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Volume 1, Issue 5
logy
February 2013
BVCPS
Why Blogging?
1 First of all, blogging is writing, 21st-century style, plain and simple. Blogging constitutes a massive genre. It comes in many forms, addresses myriad topics, and can certainly range in quality. For my money (which usually means free), blogging provides the best venue for teaching student writing. As bloggers, young people develop crucial skills with language, tone their critical thinking muscles, and come to understand their relationship to the world. matters as a result, they raise the bar for their own learning. Ask any writer of blogs how it feels to connect with his first mystery readers about what matters to them. A real audience magnifies the power of the listening, sympathetic teacher a hundredfold. Yes! you think when that stranger wrestles yay or nay with your nascent idea, thats the intellectual spark Ive been longing for. power in the hands of students? Jeff Dunn celebrates the passionate learning of students in 30 Incredible Blogs Written by Students, featuring posts about sports, pets, traveling and attending museums, raising money for charity, and a host of other topics. In some ways, blogs are the new show and tell, allowing students to share their own very infectious love of learning.
Page 2
Instructional Technology
age, sound, and video to communicate a message so thoroughly to so wide an audience. As bloggers, students learn to consider the impact of the artfully placed photograph or infographic versus the more mundane but less intrusive hyperlink. Students weigh the tone and power of their own words against the aggressive influence of a video or the more subtle reinforcement of an audio insert. Students study the power of an arresting image to set a delicate tone or to convey an abstract concept. Essentially, blogs allow students to learn how to write with every medium at their wriggling fingertips.
The aggregate power of our students and other learners to come together to solve problems, meet one another on common ground, and build capacities for good makes more optimistic than I have ever been in my entire life optimistic for my students and for humanity.
Reality Check
Lest you think Ive spent too much time under a rock listening to the old Coca-cola commercial, Id Like to Teach the World to Sing, or that I have totally shut my eyes to the hate sites, porn, and other distasteful things in the blogging world, let me confess that Im known to my friends and loved ones as a pretty tough cookie. Im no Pollyanna, thats for sure. Yet, as I have written this post, I have realized that I am speaking as much from my own experience as a passionate writer of several blogs over the years as I am from my experience as a passionate teacher of writing. Yet even as I acknowledge the unseemly, untidy, even unexceptional side to blogging, I must also affirm its power over any other way of writing Ive adopted in the past. Its power to transform me, as I have grown through blogging, has been tremendous. I see its power to transform my students, who are building their place in the world, as even greater.
Source: Davis, Susan Lucille. (2012, October 12). 10 Reasons why I want my students to blog, Getting Smart. Retrieved from http://gettingsmart.com/cms/blog/2012/10/10 -reasons-why-i-want-my-students-blog/ Ms. Davis teaches 5th and 6th grade Language Arts in Houston, TX. She is also an instructor for CTYOnline, a distance education program which provides a challenging curriculum to gifted students, PK-12, in over 60 countries. CTYOnline is sponsored by Johns Hopkins University.