Tech Tools: Student Blogging

Let me just say up front that I know I’m &submit=Search" target="_blank">hardly the first per­son to address this topic, and I’m sure I won’t be the last. In fact, so much has already been writ­ten on the sub­ject of stu­dent blog­ging that I’m not going to spend time here talk­ing about the basic rea­sons or the how-​​tos of doing it. Oth­ers have done that bet­ter than I.

What I want to explore today are a few of my thoughts about why blog­ging is a par­tic­u­larly pow­er­ful tool to give to gifted stu­dents. Gifted stu­dents have some unique needs that blog­ging can help teach­ers to address.

Self-directed learning

Gifted stu­dents need fre­quent oppor­tu­ni­ties to explore their own inter­ests and pas­sions. In a cur­ricu­lum dri­ven by stan­dards and packed full of con­tent, there is lit­tle room for stu­dent choice. Even when teach­ers are able to com­pact the cur­ricu­lum, there remains the prob­lem of how to ensure stu­dents are doing mean­ing­ful work with the extra time that is given them.

Blog­ging can pro­vide one solu­tion to that. Student-​​written blogs can take many forms and be used in many ways. Whether stu­dents con­tribute to a class­room blog or cre­ate their own, whether the blog is built around a class­room project or it is more open-​​ended, the nature of blog­ging per­mits stu­dents to choose when, how, and how much to write.

As Dean Shareski points out, too, blog­ging is more about read­ing than it is about writ­ing. Stu­dents can and should take time to read a great deal about what they want to learn before they write about it. The teacher can and should pro­vide start­ing points for this read­ing, but the power of blog read­ing comes from stu­dents explor­ing on their own, fol­low­ing links within blog posts, read­ing other arti­cles by the same authors, and look­ing for new con­nec­tions and relationships.

Blog­ging also allows stu­dents the oppor­tu­nity to spend time dig­ging more deeply into a topic. Gifted stu­dents can become intensely focused on an idea, cap­tured by its intri­ca­cies and impli­ca­tions, and by blog­ging about them, stu­dents are given room to play with those ideas infor­mally and in their own time.

High level thinking skills

As long as I have been in the pro­fes­sion, teach­ers have been encour­aged to strive for &hl=en" target="_blank">higher-​​order think­ing in their les­son plan­ning and instruc­tion: activ­i­ties like ana­lyz­ing, eval­u­at­ing, and cre­at­ing. Despite this push, the major­ity of time spent on the major­ity of school activ­i­ties today still revolves around the lower lev­els of think­ing: remem­ber­ing, under­stand­ing, and applying.

When a gifted stu­dent is involved in blog­ging it is dif­fi­cult not to incor­po­rate higher lev­els of think­ing. They are a nat­ural part of the process. Blog­ging is far more than just writ­ing about an idea. It involves much deeper con­nec­tions, both lit­er­ally and fig­u­ra­tively. A blog­ger must not only write but also seek out the con­nec­tions with other ideas.

Even just being a good com­menter [aside: this is some­thing I need to do a far bet­ter job of myself] requires the blog­ger to ana­lyze and eval­u­ate the work of oth­ers. A worth­while com­ment adds some­thing to the con­ver­sa­tion (more on this below) and doesn’t just make obser­va­tions or cheer on the blog­ger, and that requires think­ing and cri­tiquing the content.

Interaction with like-ability peers

This for me is a par­tic­u­larly impor­tant issue. For very valid and worth­while rea­sons, schools have reduced or elim­i­nated many forms of abil­ity group­ing. Unfor­tu­nately this often has the side-​​effect of reduc­ing the oppor­tu­ni­ties for gifted stu­dents to spend time with stu­dents of sim­i­lar abil­ity, a strat­egy with a great deal of research sup­port.

It is a com­plex chal­lenge for schools to cre­ate inclu­sive envi­ron­ments with integrity and still allow gifted kids the time they need to inter­act with other gifted kids.

Blog­ging expands the bound­aries of the class­room and the school. As a teacher of the gifted, I worked in three build­ings with stu­dents in many grade lev­els. Even with the pull­out pro­gram, it was unusual for my stu­dents to get the oppor­tu­nity to work with more than three or four other gifted kids at a time. To bring more kids together in a learn­ing space, I devel­oped a class­room blog where all of my stu­dents in all of my schools could inter­act and even col­lab­o­rate on dis­cus­sions and projects. Although it didn’t get far off the ground in the two months I was using it before I left the class­room to take an admin­is­tra­tive posi­tion, the stu­dents and their par­ents saw the poten­tial and embraced it as far as I was able to take it.

In a blog, grade and age dif­fer­ences are lost and stu­dents can engage in con­ver­sa­tions not just with other kids in their school or dis­trict, but with stu­dents and adults around the world who have sim­i­lar inter­ests and abilities.

Authentic experiences

All of these add up to authen­tic learn­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties. Read­ing and writ­ing blogs is a real-​​world activ­ity. Twenty-​​first cen­tury learn­ing is about com­mu­ni­ca­tion, col­lab­o­ra­tion, prob­lem solv­ing, and tech­nol­ogy, all of which are inte­gral to blog­ging. Stu­dents who reg­u­larly read and write blogs have the poten­tial to develop rela­tion­ships not just with stu­dents in their classes but also with experts in the fields they are study­ing.

No one approach or tech­nique can solve every teach­ing dilemma, and none can work equally well for every stu­dent. Blog­ging can fill many roles, though, and pro­vide many oppor­tu­ni­ties that would be dif­fi­cult to cre­ate oth­er­wise. Done thought­fully, gifted stu­dent blogs can pro­vide a tremen­dous return on the rel­a­tively small invest­ment of time and energy.