Headed Down East

For the first time in just over a year I’ve had the urge to write on my edublogs site.  I guess that means it’s a truly organic experience, but why the apathy?  It was partly due to my frustration with how the realities of my last experiences with edublogs did not match the original vision.  I started edublogs with the intent of having each student online writing a blog.  More importantly, they were going to find some intrinsic value in writing blogs.  Even more so, they were going to read and respond passionately to one another’s blogs.  In some ways the writing was great.  It was more informal and reflected the students’ voices in a way that is often lost in formal writing assignments.  In some cases the dialogue was great.  There were a few sincerely passionate back and forth commentaries between students.  But mostly it turned into 25 students writing in 25 separate places with little interaction between authors.  The icing on the cake was when I went to set up edublogs for the spring semester of 2007 and the site was so broken in turned into a chaotic lab session where no-one could get logged on.

At that point I abandoned edublogs and went to wikispaces (http://newsthatmatters.wikispaces.com/) for students to post current event articles.  This was better in that everyone posted in the same space.  It was worse in that it did not facilitate the more informal and conversational writing that is encouraged by blogs.

How any one of us uses the available technology is increasingly a reflection of how we as individuals work and think.  Assigning blogs or wikis or aggregators or other online tools is often self-defeating in the classroom because while the teacher may think in the way he or she chooses to structure the online environment, only a portion of his or her students will also think that way.  Certainly it will be a minority; it may well be none of them.  And yet, as teachers we need some sort of relatively uniform system that enables us to assess and respond to the work of our students in a way that is meaningful and also realistic to accomplish in the limited hours we have to dedicate to students.

Is there an online tool that will capture students’ intrinsic interests while also producing something that can be manageably read and assessed by the teacher?  Should teachers allow students to use a variety of online tools?  Could the work online be primarily unregulated in the formal sense of “assessment?”

These are questions I will try to answer in the next few days as I embark on a new Civics course with renewed hope for classroom and online interaction between my students.