Blogs

Why your school should blog

8 Mar 2012

By John Sutton, expert in all things blogging and one of the founder members of Creative Blogs.

Blogging has been the single biggest impacting resource I have used in 11 years of teaching – transforming pupil engagement!
David Mitchell, Deputy Headteacher at Heathfield Primary School in Bolton.

There has been an explosion of interest in blogging in schools in the last 12 months. I see evidence of this every day. My business sells blog platforms to schools and we have doubled the number of projects we are engaged in over the last year. On Twitter more and more teachers are talking about their class blogs and linking to blog posts to share the outstanding work of their pupils. Projects like Quadblogging.net and the 100 Word Challenge are engaging thousands of pupils across the globe. The recent Feb29th.net project generated almost 10,000 blog posts from children and teachers in just 48 hours.

There are a number of reasons I routinely give for setting up blogs in school. The first group are all about teaching and learning, and the second group is all about engaging with your school’s community in its broadest sense:

• To provide real audience and purpose for children’s writing across the curriculum
• To celebrate pupils’ learning and achievements
• To promote standards in literacy and facilitate peer review
• To develop safe opportunities to collaborate with other schools and outside experts
• To provide a secure and authentic environment through which children can explore and learn about the world of digital literacy
• To give a platform for pupil voice to be heard and developed

and

• To encourage the wider community to get involved in the work of your school
• To offer visitors a ‘window’ into the everyday excellence that takes place in your school.
• To distribute the workload of maintaining a website more evenly across the school's staff
• To allow stakeholders such as governors or parents’ groups to participate in the school’s web presence

The single most important reason among all of these is the first: blogging is all about audience. When you find out that last year the boys in year 6 at Heathfield primary school wrote, on average, 30,000 words each on their class blog, most of which was not directed by their teacher, you know something interesting is happening. In the case of most 11 year olds, the only writing they actually do is that which is directed by their teacher, yet these children were becoming habitual writers. It’s no surprise that the school’s Level 5 writing scores leapt from 12% to 63% that year and has been maintained since. It’s clear from talking to children about blogging that the biggest single motivational factor is audience. Why should we be surprised?

Professional authors tend, on the whole, to write for their audience. I like to draw the comparison between a child writing a story in a literacy book and writing the same story on a blog. In the former case, two people will get to read that story: the child that wrote it, and their teacher. Children aren’t stupid, they fully understand that what they’ve been asked to do is an exercise to teach them how to write. This might be fine for those children whose goal in life is to get a sticker from their teacher for “good work”. But, for the majority the marking tray is a hospice where their work goes to die. Now compare the child’s experience with that same story written on a blog. The audience is potentially limitless; anyone with a web connection can read his work. Hopefully, if the class blog is well promoted, the child will receive peer reviews from pupils and teachers, not just from within his school, but from other schools that they blog with and from visitors from across the globe who discover the class blog for themselves. 

In short, blogging turns children from pupils churning out responses to writing exercises into authors with a real awareness of and responsibility to their audience. And that, in a nutshell, is why your class should be bloggers.

Let Sharon, a year 5 from an inner city school in London explain it much better than me (it’s worth reading what Sharon’s teacher, Jack Sloan, has to say too, via the link at the foot of the article:

Have you ever thought that the Internet was an incredible waste of precious time? Do you really think that mindless kids could achieve incredible things? Are  you positively sure that blogs are any safer than enraged hyenas? Well if you really are that cynical, I don’t know what kind of things you have been hearing. However I haven’t written this great (if I say so myself) article to mock you. This is specifically to the most negative of adults (and kids) who haven’t the foggiest idea of what they are talking about when they say ” Blogs are horrendous, they’re not safe . BLAAH, BLAAH, BLAAH!” And on and on they drone. I guarantee you that by the end of this article you will be star stuck. Also you will be left in complete and utter awe, just thinking “Where was I  all this time?” Utterly re-born (trust me!) “Yeah, yeah, as if I will ever learn to love a nonsense blog,” you may be complaining. Even if you are in this position, you will soon understand what the fuss is about.

A long time ago (in approximately 2009) lived a time where life and excitement were at war. Blogs and schools neglected each other. A time that I honestly hated. When no one really cared about us poor, innocent, little children. And if you were to learn this piece of information from anyone in the world, you would probably have to learn it from us, the spectacular Ferry lane Yr5. Soon after (basically 2010) the blogging revolution changed everything completely. It took a turn down brilliant lane, which of course was marvellous. Blogs were officially accepted in schools! Such mind-blowing news, right? Well not for all (maybe not even for you). If you would just  hear my humble yet glorious words, your treacherous thoughts will vanish within one heartbeat.

Beautiful things happen at times you don’t quite expect them to. I mean, we used to live a life of horror and torture (this was before, mind).Until the hero arrived (finally), of which you may know him as….” MR .SLOAN!” You could get why he was so popular to us. He was THE creator of blogs. Well let’s just say the creator of blogs within our area. When the blog began, each and every one of our lives transformed from a terrible murky grey, to sprinkles of gold. We started to write, write, write and we became more famous by the minute (not so surprising really). Although this isn’t my  point, in fact being famous is never the point of blogging and never will be. What I am trying to say is that when you see kids (even adults) learn and explore brand new and fascinating things, don’t you think much more excitement  will grab hold of someone’s distressed life. That wouldn’t be so horrible, would it? Just think of it!

Aren’t you a tiny bit tired of hearing the same old words being said by the exact same people “I don’t want to do any work!” Don’t you just plead to see children have a laugh (a good laugh by the way) on the Internet knowing that they are proud of their own precious work? You see, me being a child, I certainly know that us kids just don’t get many opportunities during our childhoods. That’s one of the greatest things about the blog, no matter what the age; you have the skills to SHINE (seriously)!

Encouragement has a huge influence on blogging. No encouragement means no more writing. Children will never for the rest of the millennium, even think about typing a single letter on the blog. Plus all these users from around the world will expect outstanding work. This is why it is a big deal for people to comment. You know, to make them think ” Oh I’m quite good at this let me carry on doing it!” To make them never give up on a single dream. The impact on my life would most definitely be the blog. The comments make me stronger as a person, the activities are compelling and I just have a BLAST!!

” So what, you get good comments, you still haven’t proved to me why I should go on this so called, ridiculous Ferry lane blog .”Well, you just don’t understand the complete message of blogging, do you.” (and anyway who said I was finished). You can’t even be bothered to go on this stupendous blog, and yet gazillions of people from all around the world can. I can name you a montage of countries that have checked up on our blog. Australia, America even Mongolia. New Zealend, Canada, Swaziland too, (you see the rhyme I just did there). So you get what I’m saying. The quality of our work is outstanding and that’s what usually gets more people attracted to our blog ( you can’t argue with that, we’ve already had over 1,000 comments in 5 months).

All pieces of great of work are something that children cherish. In 10 years time, we will probably think ” Oh, is that really what I did at the age of 10?”  Blogs aren’t just about improving your writing, there are sacks of things that you could do. Maths, science, being critical about each other and more. This doesn’t only affect users, it also helps other generations. Basically, when new kids start blogs we could be an inspiration to them, people from outside of Ferry lane.” Ok, I admit, I JUST NEED TO START BLOGGING!!”.You see, blogs aren’t made for lazy, people who waste time. So don’t just sit there, START PRONTO!!!

http://year5.ferrylane.net/2011/01/21/why-bother-with-blogs-by-sharon-2/

Article contributed by John Sutton, one half of the expert and pioneer blogging team that make up Creative Blogs. With a complete passion to see the power of blogging empower pupils of all ages and a growing community of over 80 schools built up over seven years, Creative Blogs has developed a wealth of practical knowledge and experience of the technical, organisational and pedagogical application of blogging.Visit there inspirational website here  http://creativeblogs.net 

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