Students as Class Bloggers

Last school year, I finally dipped my toes in with students blogging about class activities. It was a tiny step, only a few student posts, but enough to reveal the benefits of this practice. As a middle school math teacher, I look for ways to balance hands-on experiences with collaboration and meaningful technology integration. Inviting students to blog about classroom activities did all of this and more. I believe student blogging also gave students a sense of ownership in the classroom, with my website, and it provided an opportunity for students to write for an authentic audience. It's a practice I plan to continue to develop in the upcoming school year.

What I Did Last Year
My first venture into students as class bloggers was in asking students to write about our class experiences participating in the Hour of Code. In this particular case, I asked for a volunteer, she wrote a wonderful piece, and I posted it on our class website home page. It was an exercise in student choice for her and challenged her to capture the event in writing to share with others. Small steps.

More effectively, I combined student blogging with a hands-on activity exploring volume. I am always snapping pictures of what we are doing in class. Less often, I post the pictures. Another goal for this year - post more images of the process of learning. With the images from our hands-on volume activity, I created a short post on my website, simply asking, "What's going on here?" I then invited all students to write a blog post describing what students were doing in the images and connecting it to our learning about volume. This was optional for students, but quite a few participated. I included a link to a Google Form in my post so that students could easily submit their writing. In this instance, I was the one who selected which posts I would then include on the website to accompany the images. I looked for posts that accurately described the activity, connected it with content vocabulary and demonstrated understanding of the concepts being explored in the activity. As I read through the posts, it was clear that writing the posts was an excellent way for students to further solidify their understanding AND for me to assess their understanding of the concepts.

What I Will Do Differently This Year
I think posting images of learning in progress was a great way to engage students and to give them a starting point for their writing. This year, I will ask ALL students to write about the learning activities rather than making it optional. Why waste an opportunity to write about math? Secondly, I will provide a simple rubric for the blog posts so that all students understand what they are being asked to do. Third, instead of me choosing the post that best describes the learning, I want to involve students in the process of assessing the submitted posts and selecting which ones will be posted to our class website. When I think of the layers and levels of learning in this process I wonder why I have not been doing this already!

• Students are learning in the hands-on experiences
• Students are working with a partner and talking about content
• Students recall their learning when viewing images and being challenged to describe in the blog post
• Students, in assessing submitted posts, are then evaluating each post for accurate and effective descriptions of the learning concepts

While many elements of this process are straightforward, the biggest challenge that I foresee is developing procedures/logistics for students to analyze submitted posts. The first time we try this process, we will do whole class analysis of several mock posts to make sure that all are clear on the criteria for assessment. Possibly combining the students into groups, having each assess a certain number of posts and choose the one that best describes the activity and content. Lots of opportunities for collaboration, for justifying thinking and making arguments for why one piece is more successful than another.

This entire process increases ownership in learning, builds the classroom community and provides an authentic audience for student writing. Stay tuned for details on how this goes!