Can 6 and 7 year olds blog?
I though this kind of spoke for itself…
Killing Creativity
There are tremendous pressures on public schools to “perform” these days. Many of these pressures are political (think “No Child Left Behind,” private school vouchers) and others come from parents and communities who may perceive that their schools are not fully serving their children. With regard to the latter, there are plenty of data to support the notion that some schools are underperforming when compared to US standards (check SchoolMatters for an excellent data source) and particularly when compared to students from other countries. (Perhaps this is not surprising given that our current administration routinely disregards science for political gain and that three current Republican presidential candidates do not believe in evolution, but we’re not going there today…)
Given these pressures to demonstrate yearly gains primarily through standardized test results, it’s not surprising that schools are often criticized for squelching creativity and suppressing academic behavior that may be perceived as tangential to the norm. Kris (no last name given) presents an excellent case for the suppression of creativity in her Wandering Ink post entitled “How To Prevent Another Leonardo da Vinci.” Based on ideas from the book How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci [Amazon link], Kris provides us with some interesting insights into the nature of creativity and how public schools tend to prevent its appearance. Here’s an example:
“2. Dimostrazione (from “How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci”)
What? Constant testing of knowledge through experience and persistence; accepting of and learning from mistakes
The Murder: Except in the sciences (and sometimes even then), knowledge is simply given and expected to be absorbed rather than questioned and tested. On tests and labs, wrong answers cost the students their grades, therefore it becomes unacceptable to make mistakes. Mistakes are less about learning experiences and more about losing marks. Questioning societal norms is a very negative thing, even if they don’t make sense.”
Kris’ observations should be required reading for all educators, K-12 through post-secondary.
Why am I writing about this in a blog about Web 2.0 issues? The answer is that we tend to look at Web 2.0 technologies (as well as others) as being the answer to allowing creative expression back into the pedagogical model. Blogs and wikis and social networking sites allow up to communicate, interact, and collaborate in ways that have never before been available. The web gives us information at our fingertips, potentially allowing us to explore interests (passions?) individually at out own paces. Therefore, unleashing these technologies in our K-post secondary classes will result in a veritable cornucopia of creative expression, right?
Not necessarily. Lecturing to students about the efficacy of blogs is the same as lecturing to students about constructivist teaching. If you’re not modeling the behavior you are advocating, you are proving that the behavior is just another concept to be learned for a test. Web 2.0 technologies are not inherently empowering–they must be used in empowering ways. Students learn much more from the model of pedagogy they are presented with than from the content of the presentation. To teach the efficacy of blogging, you must become an active blogger. To teach a constructivist approach to classroom teaching, you should model constructivism in your own teaching. Creativity comes not from the tool itself but from the context in which it is used and presented.
It’s not just about lip service…
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Blogs and Wikis in Teaching
Still very interested in investigating the idea of evaluating blogs, I recently came across an entry from the TechLearning Blog that caught my attention. An elementary school teacher in Shanghai who blogs with his students had some of his fifth grade students come up with their own rubrics for evaluating blogs. The results are interesting and can be seen on this page.
But once you get there, keep reading. The discussion evolves into a more general discussion of digital writing and wikis, with some interesting remarks from a high school social studies teacher who uses wikis to help students understand complex concepts through collaborative wiki writing.
In many places in the discussion, the term “Teaching 2.0” is mentioned. Here is a quote from the Techlearning Blog about the nature of Teaching 2.0:
“Teacher 2.0 puts students at the center of the learning experience; they [sic] allow students to control the learning environment and create content that contributes to the global body of information. Teacher 2.0 creates an environment that allows learning to happen. They [sic] guide students by engaging in conversations either virtual or face-to-face.Teacher 2.0 understands that learning occurs when every member of the class is both a student and a teacher. That teaching and learning goes beyond the walls of the physical classroom. [sic] Teacher 2.0 understands that content is ever changing; therefore focusing on skills that help us understand the changing nature of content is more critical than the content itself. Teacher 2.0 is caring, compassionate, and is willing to take risks.”
I am not aware of the term “Teaching 2.0.” I’m going to investigate it more. Perhaps it will become the focal point of another blog entry.
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More on Evaluating Blogs
If you require that students create and maintain a blog, you are probably obligated to evaluate it some way. I don’t much like the idea of just “counting” them–i.e., giving points for creating a blog to satisfy a requirement regardless of the content (much for the same reasons that I dislike giving points for participating in a discussion thread). So I have been looking around to see how other educators evaluate student blogs.
Being a fan of using rubrics to both outline and evaluate student projects, I looked there first and found several examples that are worth considering. The 2-Cents Worth blog has a very good discussion of evaluating blogs, pointing out the essential difference between evaluating blogging as an activity and the content of a blog as writing. Both are important aspects of what I might be looking for in a student blog–I want them to understand the concept of blogging but also to consider the quality of their writing. The Comments section of 2-Cents worth is worth reading as well–lots of good ideas and links, a few of which I’ll reproduce here. For example, check out this blog reflection rubric.
Bud’s Blog Experiment has some interesting insights on blogging as a student activity. Don’t forget to read the comments.
Do you have any thoughts to share about evaluating student blogging?
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Elementary Blogging
Writing for an audience is an important aspect of effective written communication. We should probably be asking ourselves how blogging might serve this purpose at all grade/age levels. In this post, I’ll look specifically at blogging with elementary students.
There are many obvious issues related to blogging with elementary students–personal privacy, content control, copyright and plagiarism, FERPA issues, and so forth. Simply turning elementary students loose to write whatever they want can easily lead to problems. On the other hand, blogging is a perfect tool for writing for an audience. Think of it as the ultimate Writer’s Workshop–post your story, receive comments from readers, and interact with them to improve your writing. What could be better?
The folks at haranbanjo.com have come up with a potential solution for some of the problems. KidzBlog (nice web 2.0 title…) is a blogging tool built especially for elementary students (although it could easily be used with older students). One advantage is that KidzBlog can be housed on a local computer at a school, keeping the blogs “in house” rather than on the public internet. Blogs can also be posted to publicly accessible sites. There is a commenting function that can be turned off once it is set up.
The KidzBlog User Guide explains how the program works, and the KidzBlog Weblog discusses some issues with the program, including pricing. It’s not free.
I’d be interested to hear what you think about this topic…
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Evaluating Blogs
In giving some further thought to the idea of actively blogging as part of my ED 429 class, I’ve come to the following (probably temporary) conclusions:
- I’m going to require blogging. That will probably necessitate some way of evaluating students’ blogging activity. My inclination will be to break the semester up into four four-week quarters and require a post during at least three weeks of each four. That way, students can’t satisfy the blogging requirement by doing a lot of meaningless blogging at the end of the semester just to fulfill a requirement.
- I probably won’t evaluate the quality or content of the blog as long as the entries meet the minimum requirement of making relevant comments about class activities.
- I’m going to allow in-class time for student blogging. I’ll give the students time to blog about an activity in terms of its utility for them as future teachers, questions or comments about the activity, and any other thought that comes to their minds. I’ll blog along with them.
I’d appreciate any comments that you all might have on evaluating blogs.
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