2 sir W lov

Well, my fascination with the blogosphere has now taken me into brave new territory - the world of educational blogging.

Not that that's so new for me. I do, after all, have my own personal, rarely updated educational blog. But now I'm experimenting in a blog that my students, and other students at the same year level, can use. The theory behind it as that the web has a magical power over our students, that some who are completely unwilling to talk in class will happily talk online for hours. Is this something we can harness for educational effect? Quite probably. Is it easy to do? Yes and no.

Setting up the blog itself was a breeze. It took a mere five minutes on learnerblogs.org to set myself up with a username, password and blog. Getting the site functioning as something more than a personal vanity project was a bit trickier. Initially I planned on making it something that all students had to register for, to avoid any unwanted e-traffic. (Which is, I regret to say, why I'm not going to put a link to it from here, because, while I theoretically trust you all, I don't know who most of you are, and am not sure that I want you hanging around my students.) However, given how few people actually have the site's URL, I doubt it will get out of hand. If it does...well, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Ultimately, it was too much of a hassle to register other teachers, let alone students, so in the end I gave up. This shouldn't be a problem, unless we start getting e-stalked by someone particularly unsavoury, but the main shortcoming is that students can't write posts. They can only respond to the posts that we've written.

Neverthless, as far as student-centred learning goes, the site's doing pretty well now. Students are chatting enthusiastically about Arthur Miller's "The Crucible", using punctuation and grammar that would make Miller cringe, but they would have done that in their essays anyway.

The one dampener has been the handful of students that have just HAD to be immature about it - the kind, of course, who would have been immature about most things we did, but it's still a nuisance, particularly when their immaturity is now theoretically open for the world to see. It's also just a bit sad when some of the students who this was most designed for - kids who are into computers but not brilliant at English - treat it as a joke or a waste of time. And, of course, there's the kids who haven't even got a copy of "The Crucible" yet, and no amount of technology is going to help them write intelligent comments on a book they haven't read. It's a sad reminder that, no matter how much effort we put into being engaging, there's still a need for students to try being engaged.

But on the whole, it's been a roaring success, at least for its first two days of active existence. Certainly the number of intelligent and useful comments being made far outweigh the idiocy of some other comments, and, at the end of the day, I'm the site administrator, and can block any comment that I deem inappropriate. On the plus side, students from different classes are communicating readily with each other, and with a range of different teachers - a real community of learning.

Pity some kids still have to be idiots, but you can't succeed with everyone. Technology's not the all-purposes answer, but it's certainly helping.