Blogging to Learn

Students and teachers the world around are intimately familiar with the journal response. Journaling, which sounds interesting and self-reflective at first, quickly loses its charm after years of text-based prompts and required responses. Students begin to loathe journals, and the teachers are rarely enchanted by the work the students return (and here, I speak from experience on both sides).

In my own teaching, I'm experimenting with different ways to make journals exciting. Morning warm-ups, which are typically modeled after response-and-answer journals, will focus on both personal and textual questions in an attempt to keep the routine interesting. I'm currently trying dialogic journals with my students, where they are tasked with writing a response to one or more questions before exchanging journals and responding to another student's answers. Students have a clear, defined audience beyond the teacher, which is an audience they tend to care more about impressing. When students know their words will be read by people, and not just graded and tossed aside, students are more conscientious about the quality of work they produce.

One way to incorporate novelty, excitement and a clear audience into journaling is to move the entire process online. Blogs, like this very blog you read now, allow a forum for students to respond to complex questions. When they publish that response, they are adding their own ideas to the class' understanding of the text, and they have an opportunity to informally respond to one another. Students are also working in a medium they are extremely used to . . . almost every student has written their own blog to extend their own thoughts and feelings on a subject. The familiarity helps to make a traditionally tedious process - journal response - seem simpler and more engaging.