Learning and Leading - February 2011

You’ve heard it over and over again: Web 2.0 tools, such as wikis and blogs, are a great way to get students engaged and motivated to practice their writing skills. If you’re new to the whole Web 2.0 world, though, you may wonder where to start. Fortunately, an army of educators has already tried them all to determine what works when it comes to using these tools in the classroom and what doesn’t, and researchers have begun publishing the results so the rest of us can learn from their experiences.

I’m one of those researchers. A colleague, Deborah Polin, and I traveled around the United States to get a firsthand look at how teachers are developing successful Web 2.0 activities for their classrooms. With funding from Intel, we interviewed 39 educators in 22 schools throughout the country about how they employed these tools in their classrooms in innovative ways and what helped improve student learning. We also spoke with and observed many students in these schools. (You can read the paper we presented at ISTE 2010 on the Center for Children and Technology website at http:// cct.edc.org/report.asp?id=271.)

We found that the teachers who have had the best luck with Web 2.0 are using the tools to create ongoing conversations among students and “always on” learning communities. We also learned that, as with any technology, careful instructional planning is of paramount importance.

Specifically, we identified three
elements that have clearly shaped
how these teachers used Web
2.0 to create sustained,
meaningful commu-
nication among their
students:

• Instituting daily practice

• Carefully considering the audience

• Teaching and enforcing appropriate behavior

Daily Practice

Most of the Web 2.0 activities that became the underpinnings of the successful learning communities we studied were not “special projects” that the teachers assigned to their students every once in a while. They made using these tools a daily practice in their classrooms.

That is not to say that the students used the tools the same way adults use them in a social or business context. Our observations suggest that these tools function very differently in the classroom than in the “real world.” For instance, blogs in the public sphere are often places for experts or celebrities to share their opinions or activities. They privilege the individual’s voice and aren’t really about having a dialogue with Justin Bieber, for example. Wikis are typically multi-authored documents, such as Wikipedia, that focus on the final product while leaving the authors in anonymity. In contrast, we found educators using both these tools to support the process of discussing and sharing ideas among students.

Although wikis had their place in these teachers’ classrooms, those we interviewed saw blogs as a generally more effective conversation tool for inspiring interest and communication. The types of blogs they used fell into two categories, individual and classroom.

Individual student blogs. Most teachers reported that it was difficult to create meaningful educational activities as part of daily practice when students authored their own blogs. In the absence of any big project or special activity, students were often unmotivated by the individual blog tasks for various reasons.

Some students were self-conscious about making their school work publicly available for everyone to read. For example, one teacher described a failed blog activity that asked students to blog about a time when they had been bullied or had bullied someone. But less problematic topics were sensitive for students as well, depending on the audience they expected to be reading their posts (more on audience later).

Students also felt reluctant to blog if they thought they had nothing meaningful to say about the topic or suspected no one would want to read about it. One French teacher, while exploring how to use Web 2.0 tools, asked students to post the French names of three favorite foods to their blogs and then comment on their peers’ selections. This, of course, was not a sensitive topic, but none of the students found it very interesting. They described it as “no worse than any other homework,” and the teacher was unhappy with the activity.

The most successful individual blog tasks we learned about involved using the blog principally as a private means of communication between the teacher and each student. One teacher of children with emotional and behavioral challenges uses private blogs as a space for students to reflect freely on their classroom experience and learning. She requires students to post regular reflections on their blogs, where they can express their feelings about the class. They can access their own blogs anytime from anywhere over the Web, but their peers could not read or comment on their posts. These blogs served as the students’