Edublogs: Making writing relevant

I hate reading essays! What a thing for a teacher to say, right? Language teacher are supposed to love it when their students produce pages upon pages of typed (or written) essays. For me, essay writing feels like the perfect example of the dichotomy between what we do in school and what we do for the rest of our lives out of school. I can just hear that imaginary student in my class that would ask me the question:

"But, when will I use this in my life?"

I remember being that student and wonder how often am was going to need to know the hypotenuse of a triangle or when I was ever going to need to write a Haiku. Now, here I am, on the other side of the argument. Gotta make it relevant!

My French Immersion 8 classes had just entered a unit on argumentative writing and I wanted to make sure they were learning more than just how to write an argument. I wanted them to learn how to interact with a writing form that is more relevant today. I decided this was the unit to use a class blog! "Ha!" I told myself,  "it's the perfect use of argumentative writing! They will have an audience and learn about tagging, linking, and copyright for images. Heck, some may even embed a video or two in their blog post. It will be great!"

My blog program of choice was Edublogs. I had used it before with a Grade 3 class that didn't go as I hoped. However, I was confident that the program was ideal this time. With Edublogs, I could create all my student accounts, moderate them, and control the flow of blog posts with one login. So, off I went!

For the name of the blog, I put my super-teacher thinking cap on and came up with "Waldie Français 8". So yeah, I probably could have given that a little more thought. Oh well. I got my students logged on, explained the project to them, explained they would be responsible for one post a week, and then put them off to work.

Well, they finished the project just before Christmas and boy oh boy, what a ride it has been! I will totally do this activity with my students again. However, there is a list of "if only I knew before" types of statements that would have saved me a whole lot of headaches and struggles. Let me share some of them with you right now.

1. Make sure to have student email addresses beforehand

A part of creating the students accounts is linking it to an email address. There is no way to skip this part and if you plan on blogging with another class, just using "teacheremailaddress+1@schoolemail.com" will not work. Fortunately, our students did each have a school email address that I was able to use. If not, that would have put a definite halt on the setup park of my project.

2. Make sure to a tracking method for student posts

Now, maybe you will be more organized than I was and be able to both read and evaluate each of the student posts the second they are sent to you. However, as my students were commenting on each others posts as well, I wanted to get them posted ASAP. This led to me sometimes struggling to keep track who had posted, which post this was (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc) and had I already evaluated it. Where Edublogs does have a manner for checking blog posts for each student, it can get cumbersome when trying to constantly check for 50 students (I was blogging with two classes). Once I started keeping a paper tracking sheet, it all got easier.

3. The students will write slower than you think

Now yeah, all the language teachers reading this are saying "or course they write slow" and I thought I had taken that into consideration. They had the whole week to research, plan out, then post. However, where typing will speed up some students, it will significantly slow down others. After three weeks of blogging, I had a couple of students who had successfully completed their first post! Get ready for it to take some time.

4. Posting limits can be a pain

 With Edublogs, you are not able to post multiple blog posts in a short period of time. This is set up as a manner to combat spamming. However, when 30 students send you their post for verification and you have to try and space them all out over a few days, this can get confusing. To make matters worse, if you scheduled it to post at a time that is too close to the previous post, it will just return the post to a draft and not let you know. This led to some confusion on the part of the students, telling me "but I did submit that post to you....a couple of days ago". Next time, I may have them develop their own student blogs (which you can do under Edublogs as well).

5. The students are extremely capable!

Despite all these frustrations that I ran into, the students were incredibly engaged, picking up on the process very quickly. A single explanation of what tags were and the majority of the students were loading their posts with relevant tags. Many students added multiple pictures (all copyright free photos) with ease. Linking became an easy process for them. Also yes, I did have my amazing students who embedded videos in their blog posts as well. They were so impressive.

My conclusion

So, for those teachers out there looking for a way to get their students to write in a way that reflects a world they may interact with, consider blogging! I never had a single student ask "when will I use this in my life?"