Children as bloggers

As a keen blogger I know the various benefits of blogging as I'm sure do the readers of this blog. But how might we make better use of blogging with children? Many teachers have already experimented with blogging for children as have some parents. Most children don't need to be convinced of the wonder and worth of the Internet, but could we make better use of the Blogosphere? It has been estimated that as many as 12 million American teenagers maintain their own blogs. In this post I thought I'd outline a few basic ways in which children could become bloggers, and why.

Why might blogging be good for children?

There seem some obvious reasons for using blogs in the classroom or at home:

1. The Internet is an important form of technology that this generation needs to understand and learn to use for varied purposes. Just as we seek to introduce children to varied purposes for literacy and different texts and genres, we need to encourage them to explore the many applications of the Internet for communication and learning.

2. Each application that we experience on the Internet requires a range of web-based generic skills as well as some that are unique to the application.

3. Children need to experience web applications like blogs as creators. Just as we want children to use written narrative forms like literature as readers and writers, so too we want them to explore some web applications as creators not just users or consumers.

4. The act of writing a blog post can lead to significant research and related learning. For example, it is an excellent way to develop web comprehension and research skills.

5. Blogs offer authentic readers and audiences for children. So much classroom writing is simply for the teacher 'as examiner', but blogs offer 'real' readers who will respond as learners and fellow writers. This is powerful.

6. Blogs can offer a means for children of many nationalities to communicate and share their ideas across the globe.

7. Blogging can offer a wonderful means for children to practice a second language.

8. Using blogs as creators as well as consumers highlights the need for children to consider issues such as truth and fiction, privacy, copyright and so on.

How can teachers and parents use blogging to promote learning?

a) Showcase blogs

One of the most common ways teachers use blogs is to showcase children's work. The blog can be set up to showcase work in specific subject areas or can vary by form. For example:

• Poetry and narrative writing
• Drawings
• Videos (class activities, class performances, readers' theatre etc)
• Podcasts (personal stories, public speaking, family history, oral reports etc)

Here's a great showcase blog for a grade 5 & 6 (here).

b) Classroom News blogs

This is a common way for teachers to blog. It can have an important role in keeping parents informed about the work that their children are doing as well as being an excellent way to showcase children's work. Here is a 4th Grade class blog in the USA (here). News blogs offer less opportunities for children to compose than other forms of blogging but has a place.

c) Literature response blogs

This application offers children a greater opportunity to respond to the writing of other students. It is simply a way to take activities online that require children to respond to literature that they have read (or which has been read to them). Often the teacher posts the first entry or task and students then respond to the book that has been read. Here's one 7th Grade blog that does some reader response (here)

d) Writing blogs

These are simply blogs that allow children to share their writing. Here is a wonderful example of how one parent set up a blog to allow her child to write his own 'Choose Your Own Adventure' story (here).

e) Mirror blogs

This blog application typically encourages students to respond to a blog entry (often written by the teacher) that invites some form of reflection or comment. For example 'Mr Crosby's 6th Grade' blog (here). The name 'Mirror blog' is simply a metaphor that relates to the fact that the sites encourage students to reflect on their learning.

f) HOT blogging

Lisa Zawilinski has an approach to blogging in class that she calls 'HOT Blogging'. While I don't find the name that helpful, the idea of using a blog to develop higher order skills is useful. It involves encouraging children to share different perspectives on a topic and exchange information with one another. The aim is to develop online comprehension and communication skills while promoting collaboration. It builds on Nancie Atwell's idea of the Dialogue Journal. She suggests a 4-step process that involves:

Step 1 - Providing background knowledge - this first stage is for the teacher to set activities that require the students to find relevant sites and resources that relate to a topic (e.g. understanding the background to a book).

Step 2 - Offering invitations to share ideas or an interpretation of the topic (e.g. responses to characters, events, events in the story etc).
Step 3 - After reading the responses of classmates, students begin to summarise content, develop their ideas on the topic further etc.
Step 4 - Considering varied responses and appreciating the views expressed.

The Zawilinski approach (as she describes it) is too complex in my view, but simpler variations on the approach could be useful. The key elements are to prime background knowledge, invite responses, encourage students to consider and integrate varied views.

Summing Up

Encouraging children to explore blogging is a useful way to get them to explore the Internet while writing and reading for varied real world purposes and with authentic audiences.

The above should not be seen as the only options there are; be creative with blogs. Once you are familiar with the various options for setting up a blog, play around with your site and think creatively about how you might use the technology application to stimulate children to read, respond, write, reflect and learn.

Look for writing opportunities that encourage children to write for 'real' audiences.

Think of creative ways to get children writing together; for example, try using a 'never ending' story strategy with different students writing each entry to build on the previous entries.

Related resources

1. Interesting article on blogging by L. Zawilinski (2009, May). 'HOT Blogging: A Framework for Blogging to Promote Higher Order Thinking. The Reading Teacher, 62,(8), 650–661 (here)

2. Reading to Learn: Using 'Text Sets' (here). In this post I talk about an approach to learning that can incorporate the use of the Internet.

3. Classroom blog service providers - while you can use existing blog providers like Blogger and Word Press, there are a number of providers that offer templates for classroom blogging. These include:

a) Edulogs - offer advertisement free sites that can allow the teacher to control comments and limit access to the site. They also offer templates for students that allow them to build their own blogs.

b) Class Blogmeister - once again this is free to educators and allows teachers to connect to varied blogs. While there seem lots of inactive blogs here there are good examples and ways for teachers to connect with other teachers and classes.

c) ePals SchoolBlog - this allows teachers to connect to other blogs and offers varied design templates and useful templates for surveys, calendars, parents-only sections, controlled public access etc.

Reading to Learn: Using 'Text Sets'

A former university student, who I taught almost 20 years ago emailed me recently. She asked for some information on a curriculum idea - the 'Text Set' - that I had developed in the 1980s, and which she recalled me talking about in classes. When I tracked my only written reference to it in my book 'Pathways to Literacy' (pp 92-93) I thought I'd do a blog post on it. I wondered at first whether it might be less relevant now because the idea was developed in the 1980s when the Internet was just being conceived for mass use - 'Google it' wasn't part of our vocabulary! In a way, the text set in the hands of the teacher, offered a teacher selected Google search in a box. I have no idea who had the idea first, but the stimulus for my development of the concept was seeing something like it in a classroom linked to Professor Jerome Harste's Graduate research program when I was working with him as a postdoctoral fellow at Indiana University (Bloomington) in 1984. My own work on 'Intertextuality' (I'll do a future post on this topic) also informed its development.

A 'Text Set' consists of a collection of texts that are usually (but not always) books that deal with a single topic that children use for research and writing. It is accompanied by instructions that students follow to guide their research and writing. The theme might be transport, war, mammals, Iceland, global warming, marine life, racial understanding, poverty, space, dinosaurs, the history of.... and so on. The books collected might include non-fiction of varied kinds, fictional narratives, pictures, maps or even poetry (sometimes we would add videos and tapes). A task for children aged 7-10 years might look like this:


Using the non-fiction books on space travel, the poem 'Outer Space' by Carole Weston, and the boy's the scrapbook ('One Small Step') included in the box, write about one of these things:

How did space travel begin? (Which countries? Which people?)
Why would you like to travel into space?
Write about one interesting astronaut (where did he grow up, why did he become an astronaut, where did he train, what has he done as an astronaut...?).
What part do animals play in space travel?

You can supplement tasks like the above with complementary skill sheets that reinforce specific study and research skills that you have been teaching your children (I've listed a helpful link for doing this below).

Children don't learn literacy in a neat serial way. While in the first few years of life their literacy acquisition (at the written word level) tends to be additive, they learn a few letters, some sounds, then some words etc, once the foundations of literacy are laid, progress explodes and development occurs in multiple directions. As well, the development of literacy and their growth as learners and laguage users becomes increasingly intertwined. As children learn about literacy and language, they learn through literacy, their world and themselves as people (see my previous posts on the 'Power of literature').

As children grow as literacy users, reading and writing to learn, not just learning to read and write, they need to acquire more complex study and research skills. These include:

Where do I find the information that I need?
How do I identify the information that relates to my topic?
How do I judge the relevance of information and its truth and accuracy?
How do I make notes in my own words not just copy slabs of text?
How do I synthesise the information and present it in a form that others can access?

Children need help with all parts of the research process and they need to learn these things as they do research. The 'Text Set' is a way to introduce children to the research process in a controlled way. It works well with children as young as 6 years. Obviously the texts that you choose will need to be appropriate for 6 year olds (which will be a challenge). I should comment that applied linguists don't necessarily like a strategy like this one that encourages children to use varied written genres (or forms), because they believe that it can lead to children writing in hybrid forms rather than (for example) a traditional expository form. My view is that you can let them use varied writing to learn and you also teach them specific written genres like exposition as well.

The great value of the 'Text Set' is that it allows you to present children with multiple written genres which then act as resource for students to explore the topic. The approach also capitalises on the natural process of intertextuality, where children make connections between the things they read, hear, see and experience. The aim is to stimulate their interest as learners and to use a varied range of textual resources to help them along the way.

Why not just do a web search?

As I've already said, the 'Text Set' is a bit like a Google search in a box, so why not just do the Google search? Couldn't you just give your students a web link that directs them to a prepared list of resources online? Yes you could and it may well achieve some of the same outcomes, but the library will have resources that you can't get online and it offers more control for the teacher of the learning process and the chance to teach study and research skills along the way.

My view is that the Google search for the young child will often have as its focus searching to find information, rather than reading to learn. As well, we know that readers behave differently online - they tend to 'bounce around' almost randomly, there are quick decisions based on a few words in a link, and the behaviour is rather volatile. The skills required for online literacy are different to traditional study and research skills. A more controlled strategy like the 'Text Set' allows a more systematic treatment of basic research skills that require careful sifting of information, considered judgments about the quality of the content, and organization of what is being learned not just cutting and pasting other people's information.

While children will learn some of these as they explore the Internet themselves, they won't necessarily acquire the research skills without teacher help.

My preference is to teach children basic research skills as they learn to use the Internet. At times this will require non-web lessons that focus on the research process. At other times, you will plan web-based tasks and you might even combine the two. For example, a good variation to my 'Text Set' idea would be to supplement the task above with some web-based resources. For the task above on 'Space', you could add the following list of links:

Lots of space poetry (here)
Check out these images from the Hubble Telescope (here)
Check out the NASA - 'Kennedy Space Center' site (here)
Phoenix Mars Mission (here) - don't miss the Kids Section (here) and Mars 101 (here)
Follow 'Diary of an Astronaut' (here)
Have a look at this video on board the Space Shuttle as it blasts into space (here)

Related links and resources

For an excellent summary of the research process for children check out 'Big6 Kids' (here)

See my previous post on comprehension (here)

Is Twitter a sign that the world has finally gone ‘Twitty’?

Twitter is one of a number of microblogging tools that ask users to tell friends what they’re doing in 140 characters or less. It's a social networking service that allows users to send updates (known as ‘tweets’) that are text-based posts to their friends or strangers for that matter.


Updates are displayed on the user's profile page and are delivered to other users who sign up to receive them. You can restrict delivery to a set of friends if you like (or let the whole world see it by default). You can receive updates via the Twitter website, instant messaging, SMS, RSS, email or through an application such as Facebook. Other similar tools include Plurk, Jaiku and Pownce.

Twitter messages might seem unusual to the uninitiated:

• Trying to talk e into joining me on LIVE for some BF:BC. We have to get ready for Conquest Mode.
• Want in on the Madden tickets? Watch my blog tomorrow for detail
• Eating lunch at my desk to try and get ahead of my Inbox
• After I hard reset my touch, installed AF...still no worky. After the splash screen, I get a blank screen. This app needs an update
• Having a hell-uva time getting Aurora Feint (free download from the iTunes app store) to run on my Touch. Crashy Crashy 08

No doubt the above selection of tweets from one random person twittering on the web over a 24-hour period made sense to someone. And I assume that the constant tweets kept him and others in touch. But....

Well before I get to the 'but', and this Baby Boomer dumps on Twitter (and I will), I need to point out that others (mostly in America) see it as a great thing. In a ‘Wired’ article, ‘How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense’, Clive Thompson argues that:

“It's like proprioception, your body's ability to know where your limbs are. That subliminal sense of orientation is crucial for coordination: It keeps you from accidentally bumping into objects, and it makes possible amazing feats of balance and dexterity.

Twitter and other constant-contact media create social proprioception. They give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination.”

Dr Alice Robison who teaches in the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT also argues strongly for the educational benefits of Twitter in an article for NCTE. She suggests that there might be benefits in microblogging and that it “….might be used to teach students about concise messages. By limiting students to 140 characters to make their point, teachers can move students learn ways to cut their messages down to the cleanest expressions of their ideas.”

Mmmmm. Now, I’m prepared to accept that it might just be a useful networking tool for some people but I'm prepared to say that it will do more harm to writing, reading and maybe even our well being, than it will do good. I have four concerns:

First, what does it say about us if we are so self-absorbed that we'd think that the world wants to read random snippets about our daily lives (well maybe my wife would)?
Second, why are we prepared to spend time reading this stuff constantly; and what might be lost from relationships by reducing them to this? (And yes I know this wouldn't be the only way people are communicating).
Third, from what other activities in life do we steal the time to 'tweet' all day long? Work? Reading? Talking to our kids?
Fourth, could this be frying our brains; or at the very least scrambling them a little?

I'll comment just on the last point (maybe I'll return to the others at another time).

Mokoto Rich (Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?) points to evidence from Neurological studies that show that learning to read changes the brain’s circuitry. As well, there is more recent speculation that reading on the Internet may also affect the brain’s hard wiring in a way that is different from book reading.

Dr Guinevere Eden director of the Center for the Study of Learning at Georgetown University acknowledges that this is probably occurring and suggests that:

“The question is, does it change your brain in some beneficial way? The brain is malleable and adapts to its environment. Whatever the pressures are on us to succeed, our brain will try and deal with it.”

Nicholas Carr (author of The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google) recently wrote a piece titled "Is Google Making US Stupid" in which he shares his own concerns about the impact of the Internet (in more general terms on him personally):

"For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski."

Carr puts his finger on one of my greatest concerns about the downside of the Internet (and I write this as an active user of the Internet - I love its benefits), it can be so consuming and it is changing the things we read, write and live - both adults and children. We can argue about the many ways the Internet opens up a world of texts and knowledge, but what might be lost if increasingly we read less extended texts and write less extended texts and lose the richness of varied textual forms that we've known in the past. I hope that the essays of my grandchildren's children are not 140 characters long.

The Carr article is worth a read.

I'll probably blog about this again, but you'll also find a range of useful links to New York Times articles that link to a variety of pieces of research here.

I've also blogged previously about the broad topic of the Internet and its impact here, here, and here. And I have a more extended paper on my website here.

Would love your thoughts on this topic.

Truth and the Internet

In a previous post on "Writing, communication and technology" I commented on the limitations of the Internet (as well as its strengths) and cited the problem of not knowing whether content on websites is sound or indeed truthful. I suggested that the accuracy of any communication is largely untested and unreviewed, that individuals are able to misrepresent themselves more easily to unsuspecting audiences and that anyone can self-publish giving a misplaced sense of their own expertise and knowledge.

My argument has been given support by the "Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus". When researchers asked 25 seventh-grade students (judged to be high-performing as online readers), to check out a website with details about the rare octopus, they all thought the tree octopus was real.

As the local School Superintendent in Middletown (New York) commented, "Knowing truth from fiction on the Internet is a huge problem. Students might be good researchers, but they tend not to scrutinize the information."

I've had my concerns further reinforced in recent days by belatedly realizing that it's difficult to control the content of web-based resources like Wikipedia. When someone recently changed the description of New College to include some not so generous (and inaccurate) comments about our residents, I was led to contemplate how this happens, what you can do about it, and how you stop it from happening again? The answers were: a) anyone can change anything on Wikipedia; b) there isn't much I can do about it but there are processes used to restore content when it has been grossly misrepresented and I can always change it back; c) and, that there isn't much protection against such attacks. Now all the true believers in the Internet will say that this is its great strength. It is so open to all and hence difficult to control, allowing people to search out truth rather than having to be limited to newspapers, television and even books which are more easily controlled by powerful people, organizations or governments. There is some truth in this viewpoint and evidence that the written word can be used to coerce and manipulate. But there are also great dangers in not understanding the limitations of the internet. For there is such a thing as truth and also fiction. Wikipedia at best is founded on the belief that there are various versions of the truth (see Wiki's entry for the Bible), and at worst is influenced by the extreme relativist view that there is no such thing as truth, just individual and group constructions of meaning. Relativism has many forms but broadly teaches that we can only know things in terms of our historical and/or cultural experience and context. In its most extreme form the claim is made that there is no such thing as truth. For a discussion of Relativism explore this link.

While the internet can be useful for communicating truth, readers need to be able to assess information to judge if it is true. As Howard Rheingold points out in a recent newspaper column, "the responsibility for determining the accuracy of texts shifted from the publisher to the reader when the functions of libraries shifted to search engines". Children and adults need to ask themselves more questions of the content they encounter. Who wrote this piece? What is the author's claim to expertise and knowledge in this area? From where does the writer derive his or her sources and how well regarded are such sources? What is the purpose of the writing? What are the underlying assumptions, ideology, values and world view of the writer? How do the claims of this text match the claims of others?

There has never been a time (in my view) when we needed to give greater consideration to the authority of the texts we read and the things we see, for even images can no longer be trusted with the visual effects technology available. The need for critical readers is even more important than ever.