Blog Juice for Educational Technology

The comments on Blogging 101: Weblogs in schools make me hope more educators will get their students blogging and open that
blogging up to the public so that it begins to be perceived as a
powerful medium for thinking and learning. We have a long way to go in educating not only the public but some of our fellow educators, as well. I would rather develop
a powerful medium for thinking than produce a polished product any day.
That’s the heart of writing/blogging.

There is great potential in the power of blogging and commenting. All this is not about creating a perfect product. It’s about the process and improvement and giving ownershop to students
of their work. It’s about making them accountable and having high
expectations. Writing does
not just crystalize into fluent sentences, well-organized content, and
perfectly punctuated pieces. Writing is hard work. It’s
not the
teacher having control but doing all that is possible to do to guide
the students to want to control and produce good writing. Writing is
not trying to figure out
and perfect every single piece you
write. Good teachers stand by students during this process. They
encourage, guide and
help students discover and learn as they write. Students begin to recognize
that their voice matters and will be heard. Caring readers recognize
and respect that  the more students write the more they will improve
their writing skills. It takes time. The
process involves learning, the shaping and reshaping of ideas, and the
think-rethink process that weblogs encourage. Writing/blogging really
does benefit learning. We need to encourage, cheer our students on and
work at releasing them from trying to write for us or for a grade, and
yes even release them from always having a perfect product. All writers make mistakes.
The goal is
to give students a rich and diverse array of writing experience that
will inspire them to want to write and improve that writing themselves.

Fostering
potential is a heck of a lot better than demanding perfection. Learning to write requires much
practice and everyone has a stake in each child’s success. We need more models.

Here is a good example of a comment on one of my student blogs from Lani, a very supportive commenter, in reference to the student’s IM conversation on her blog.

You won’t be a student during the time in your elementary classroom!!
You’ll be on your way to becoming a professional. I am wondering if
that path to becoming a professional means you will be modeling
appropriate behavior for your students and demonstrating
professionalism for your teacher or principal? According to the
National Board for Professional Teaching Standards website (http://www.nbpts.org),  demonstrating professionalism is one characteristic of an accomplished
teacher which I sense you plan to be –. Do you think your teacher or
principal you work with might read your blog? I am wondering if they
might consider your blog more professional if your punctuation and
capitalization were more “teacherlike”? I did feel like we were in an
IM conversation (where I never use capitals and punctuation) as opposed
to a more formal “Teacher Cadet” blog. You have such a nice way of
sharing and explaining; I mention this notion of professionalism to
encourage you to strive for that excellence, even in these early days
of your travels in teaching and learning.

I am really interested in following your blogging and your tales of learning and teaching!!

Now
that is a commenter who knows the power of encouraging and how to build
common expectations for good writing, yet pointing it out to the
student in a way that will hopefully get her to think about her
writing. Lani is making a difference. I am so thankful for people like
Lani who take the time to comment in thoughtful ways that will help
students learn.

Student voices need to be heard. Write to learn, think
about it.  Then think about what we as educators can learn from
truly listening and developing new understandings of our students. What
an opportunity for us!

I end with a quote from Because Writing Matters (my favorite book on writing)

Emphasis
on correctness was rooted in a nineteenth-centtury model of language
development. Emphasis on mechanical errors overshadowed the deep
rehetorical, social, and cognitive possibilities of writing for
communication and critical thinking.

So, if you feel motivated to comment on a first post by a beginning
group of Teacher Cadets please travel over to the class blog (that has
links to the student blogs) and comment away to these students who are
considering teaching as a career.