Blogs: Public Words

   Words have always swirled around me like snowflakes – each one delicate and different, each one melting untouched in my hands.  Deep within me, words pile up in huge drifts.  Mountains of phrases and sentences and connected ideas.  Clever expressions.  Jokes.  Love songs.   From the time I was really little – maybe just a few months old – words were like sweet, liquid gifts, and I drank them like lemonade.  I could almost taste them.  They made my jumbled thoughts and feelings have substance.  ~ Out of My Mind – Sharon Draper  p. 1. 

Blogs give a voice to words that want to go public but aren’t sure if they are worthy.  Some blogs, however, are words that are way too overconfident.  EM Forrester once wrote, "How do I know what I think until I see what I say?" Blogs are a public way of figuring this out.  

Two of my children have been/are bloggers.  My son had a travel blog when he was overseas in Bangladesh.  Hearing his real-time experiences, untainted with time, was priceless.  Just the act of writing for an audience ( yes, more than his mother read it) caused his writing to be more introspective than diary-like.  My daughter, a photographer, blogs as part of her job.  It has been revealing to watch her blog evolve from  “all about me and what I'm feeling” to focusing on her art and its process.  

As a student in LCPS’s Literacy Journeys class last year, I was required to blog and post pictures of my class, lessons I created and reflections of these lessons as well as thoughts on the reading/writing workshop philosophy and, in turn, respond to other participants in the class.  This experience as a student is integral as I progress into integration for my students.  I found the posting part helpful, but responses were required and manufactured and often just warm and fuzzy comments, not fodder for conversation.  This would be the most difficult part of required blogging   - required comments from students who may or may not really be interested in the topic. 

Blogs are best if they are authentic and not forced, but that is not the reality of education, is it? 

There are many great uses of blogs in the classroom.  Using blogs as an online portfolio would not only be a safe house for written work that could follow the student throughout their educational history, it would be a natural place to reflect on one’s own writing and the writing of others. As in a paper portfolio, students would choose their best pieces and then reflect on the choices they made.  For me, incorporating this  will not happen this year, but it is definitely on the horizon in LCPS.   By posting on blogs, students gain an authentic audience.  Even though school blogs, for certain, would be closed to anyone outside of  class or the school, students can access others’ blogs  outside of the smaller group and  respond.  

When we normally write, the only response considered is what the teacher will say or what others will think.  Anticipating written responses of others or ways writing will inform or impact them, make the writing fluid instead of inert.