Writing in the "Real World"

One mark of a successful teacher is that he or she is able to engage her students in tasks that are both authentic and relevant to their daily lives. As educators, we cringe when we hear students making comments like, "What's the point of this?" or, "When am I ever going to have to use this in real life?" The reality is that a lot of what students do in the classroom or for homework can feel very much like busy work. By providing students with an audience for their writing and the opportunity to share their work with a community of learners, blogs provide an interesting solution to the dilemma of creating connections between classroom learning and the "real world."

Big-time proponent of the use of blogs and other web-tools in the classroom setting, Will Richardson, describes how blogging has created a new genre or writing which he calls, "connective writing." When a student posts a journal entry, homework assignment, or response to a discussion question on a blog, she is not just completing an assignment; she is contributing her knowledge, opinions, and perspectives to a larger discussion.

Richardson describes how a blog can serve as a kind of "online filing cabinet" containing student work from over the course of the entire school year. Rather than handing in assignments directly to their teacher, students post them on the classroom blog, where they can receive feedback from their peers as well as from their teacher. I could see this use of the blog as being especially effective with creative writing tasks or in a writing workshop setting, where peers, the teacher, and the authors themselves comment on various drafts of a writing assignment before it is posted in its final form. The blog as "online filing cabinet" also easily provides the opportunity for students, their teacher, and even their parents to look back over student work over the course of the school year and identify areas of progress and growth.

I am also intrigued by the use of blogs to connect students to a community of learners outside of the immediate classroom. For example, I imagine that a classroom blog could be used to promote cultural sensitivity and understanding by facilitating connections between a class of inner city refugee students and a class of rural or suburban students. Students in both classes could read a book like The City Kid & The Suburb Kid and then share about things they like to do for fun where they live, or even, in the case of the refugee students, in the countries they came from. Both groups of students would have the chance to learn about life in a community very different from their own from individuals who actually lived in that community.

If used in the ways I've just described, blogs can be an effective way of incorporating technology to address the following New York State Learning Standards:

STANDARD 1: Students will listen, speak, read, and write in English

for information and understanding.

STANDARD 2: Students will listen, speak, read, and write in English

for literary response, enjoyment, and expression.

STANDARD 3: Students will listen, speak, read, and write in English

for critical analysis and evaluation.

STANDARD 4: Students will listen, speak, read, and write in English

for classroom and social interaction.

STANDARD 5: Students will demonstrate cross-cultural knowledge

and understanding.