I’ve been generally thinking about the use of technology with students and have no doubts about whether we need to explore blogging with students. In fact, I believe we have a professional responsibility to be able to successfully integrate such tools into curriculum.

This morning Roadrunner posed these questions in her blog. “Does one modality create a better quality learning outcome than the other? Or is it the expectations of the instructor within the environment that makes the difference?” Specifically, the entry was discussing the use of the discussion board over the use of the blog. The blog entry lead me to think about the use of the blog with middle years students as a tool for writing about what one chooses over the use of a prompt to explore a topic.

There is not an either/or answer to these questions. I think the modality that one chooses depends on the learners and the instructor. For example, in this course, we are all competent writers who are able to independently choose topics according to our interests and just as importantly according to our purpose and audience. For many of us having the choice to explore topics/thoughts of interest is very appealing.

However, I don’t think it is quite that cut and dried for many of the middle years learners I teach. While I am an advocate for choice in writing, many of the struggling kids that I work with need much scaffolding before they can independently make such choices. I have worked with two groups of middle years kids to introduce blogging. I have begun each of the sessions by watching Blogging in Plain English and then having a class discussion about the purpose of blogs. We chart our findings and place this in an area of the class where it is readily available to refer to, add to and take away from. Then I immerse them in the form of writing by showing them and having them read effective blogs. We continue to add elements of effective blogs to our chart. I introduce the idea of blogging to my class through my class blog. This is known as modelling. Then I try to engage the students in writing by providing a prompt that they write a comment for. This is the guided writing aspect of the process. During this part of the process, I try to write a reply to everyone who writes and encourage them to write replies to others. This helps them see the role of the audience in their writing. Some students will need more of this scaffolding than others. An important idea to note is that some students need a fair bit of scaffolding before they can effectively take on this task independently.

Lastly, just as we learn to read by reading, we do learn to write by writing. As an educator, I want students to understand that purpose and audience dictates the form of writing they will use.  The blog is an excellent tool for students to express their thoughts, ideas and opinions.

There is room for both modalities of learning in a blog. Students can benefit from prompts that encourage them to write and reply to others.  An effective scaffold allows me to gradually release responsibility so that students are choosing their own writing topics and maintaining their own blogs.