Blogging for Kids
I’ve been thinking about ways to use the internet with my kids to further their knowledge and interest in the world around them, and I ran across this article at The Tempered Radical about teachers using blogging as a tool in their classrooms.
Blogs offer teachers and students a natural bridge between work that they are already doing (producing written reports and reflections on classroom content has been a part of classroom experiences since Socrates was stumbling around the agora with groups of learners) and work that they’d like to be doing: Exposing students to a broader audience that can publicly challenge their thinking.
What do you think about kids having their own blogs, or being part of a team blog? Do you view it as a possible avenue for kids to connect with other like-minded kids, or is it too fraught with peril?
What about churches/youth groups organizing blogs and forums for their members and youth? Anyone here have experience with this, good or bad?
Because most K12 students will struggle to generate 2 or 3 meaningful posts per week…K12?? what kindergartener is going to generate any posts? and most 12th graders are already going to be using blogs and online forums. if it’s just students posting their normal class writing into a blog system, i don’t see how that’s any better/worse than taking class time for each student to read their paper and have an open comment time. if the content is more like a normal middle-schooler’s / highschooler’s blog, i don’t see how that’s going to help anyone’s writing skills.
what’s probably a lot more useful and still online and collaborative is wikipedia. take a few weeks and teach the highschoolers about how to write properly sourced articles and how wikipedia works, divide them into teams and let them pick a small article that needs significant improvement. they should go to a library and find reliable secondary sources. they’ll have to write using proper grammar and spelling. the revision history is all available, and the teacher can grade based on the last revision produced by the team and not necessarily the current version.
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