What are the components of a high school course in blogging?
Posted by Paul Allison on January 30th, 2007
As the Spring semester starts rolling, it’s natural to be thinking big thoughts. What do we want students to take from the classes we teach? How does what we teach fit with the other courses being taught in our schools? Where does blogging fit? This week on Teachers Teaching Teachers, several Writing Project teachers — from two coasts — plan to talk about their plans for YouthVoices.net in this Spring semester. As always we want to keep this conversation real. “What are you going to ask your students to do?” Yet we would also like to keep it framed in a larger lens of why we are blogging in the first place.
Some of us who are using Youth Voices (and the Personal Learning Space) have begun to teach blogging as a course of study, and on the webcast/podcast, we will describe what we teach in these courses. (Also see this week’s Google Notebook.) But let’s take a further step back and ask whether we need courses per se. Recently Clarence Fisher has been asking about this, and perhaps he is right when he argues that that “courses need to die.”
Instead of working with individual lessons, I wondered about courses being divided into components. For example, an English teacher could divide their course into each of their projects (novel study, online safety, digital photography, etc.), tag and post these on a time-line. Then, if a number of teachers were doing this, students anywhere could assemble a course based on the requirements of their school or district.
Remote Access: Courses Need to Die
With Clarence’s words in mind, let’s take a look at blogging as a course. Do we need a separate class for blogging? For some of us blogging has become a central to our courses.
Yet if we think about it, isn’t blogging one example of something that could be divided into components and re-assembled by a team of teachers at different times? Wouldn’t it be smart for a school to take the set of skills and habits of work that blogging requires/inspires and teach these alongside other curricula, instead of teaching them in isolation like many of us do now in New Media/New Journalism/Computer Technology elective courses? What if the teachers and administrators in a school were to treat blogging as a basic skill that needed to be taught in every grade, every semester. Can we imagine a scope and sequence for blogging that would stretch across the grade levels? This is exactly what some of us are beginning to be able to envision.
We are growing in our confidence to describe exactly what it means to teach blogging — and how it is different from what is taught now in even the best writing, media, and research classes. Those of us who have been teaching blogging as a course are beginning to be specific about what needs to be in a blogging curriculum. At the same time, many of us are not ready to go to the whole school and recommend this curriculum. We realize how much time, effort and thought must be devoted to blogging to see it become a truly meaningful and student-owned activity in school.
Perhaps it sounds contradictory, but it’s the vision of blogging going across the curriculum and into every grade that motivates some of us to be developing this curriculum in our own courses. We can imagine blogging being integrated into every teacher’s classroom, the way independent reading or vocabulary study is shared by teachers in many secondary schools. But we need a bit more time to develop the questions and exact components that seem important to blogging.
Join us on this journey! This — and every — Wednesday at 9:00 p.m. Eastern (6pm PDT / 1am GMT — global times) EdTechTalk.
February 4th, 2007 at 5:39 pm
[…] Clarence Fisher - Courses Need To Die (discusses how courses should be broken up, shared, ready to be remixed - I like it! - via Teachers Teaching Teachers) […]
October 27th, 2007 at 8:26 pm
Just as with every lesson presented in a class, students must be guided into the practice of blogging. specifically, a separation of MY Space must be addressed as does the Ethics of Bogging. my students must link to the ethics of blogging and comment on the Ethics. A purpose for Blogging must also be established. Blogging for bloggins’ sake is not a purpose; blogging to tape into sutdents’ computer lives is not a purpose. i have created on line wirting teams that pratice specific, guided Peer editing strategies to assist each other. these same students have different class groups that provides further assistance with the mini lessons that will guide the comments for peer editing. Finally, each journalist must have a signed release from the sources to print to the net. By continuing the practice of teaching as a guiding into knowledge, blogging can literally expand the walls of the classroom.