private journals, and the teacher felt
they were an effective way for her to
understand what individual students
were thinking and feeling about the
work of the class.
A Spanish teacher we spoke to asks
her students to blog about an imaginary visit to a different country. It’s
not important for the other students
to read each other’s work, as her primary goal is to get her students to
write in Spanish. The motivating part
for the students is surfing the Web for
pictures, news stories, advertisements,
You Tube videos, or songs about what
teenagers do in Costa Rica, Argentina,
or Spain, which they then embed into
their blogs. The teacher also spices
up the activity by asking students to
explore current public debates in the
news during their virtual “visits.” For
example, the Costa Rica blogging
activity taught students about local
divorce laws that the parliament was
debating that week, and they learned a
lot of Spanish legal terminology in the
process.
Classroom blogs. Shared class blogs,
where students commented in response to a prompt from the teacher
and saw each others’ comments, were
much more common in the classrooms
we visited. The teacher’s goal is usually to generate a discussion among
students via the comments about what
they are learning. We found examples
of blog tasks that had at least one of
four pedagogical objectives:
• Eliciting prior knowledge
• Generating interest
• Supporting student debates
• Providing students with feedback
from their peers
A number of teachers used blog
tasks to explore prior knowledge or
generate interest. One teacher creates a
blog task for homework prior to each
new unit. To start her Civil War unit,
she required students to respond to
the prompt “What do you know about
the Civil War?” Students started off
posting just one fact but quickly began
using the space to discuss, challenge,
and explore their own and others’
knowledge and assumptions, even go-
ing to their parents or online resources
for more information—and that was
before the unit even started. Not only
did this ignite advance interest and en-
gagement in the topic, it also allowed
the teacher to get a sense of students’
previous knowledge of the topic before
she began the in-class lesson.
Audience Matters
The teachers we interviewed were very
careful about creating the appropriate
community for the activities they were
planning and thoughtful about how
they asked students to participate in
the community. The primary reason
for this is that students are very sensitive to the relationship between who
they are communicating with and
what they are talking about. Teachers address this issue in two ways: by
directing them to different audiences
(through the restriction of access to
some online activities) and by carefully selecting assignments that are
appropriate for each audience.
