After reading "Teddy Bears Go Blogging" by Brenda Sherry, my belief in the integration of technology and education has only been strengthened. While I am not ready to say that typing is the same thing as writing, this exercise still seemed valuable in the sense that the kids were interested and in control to a certain extent. I am a big believer in anything that allows students to take control of a project themselves and let it be their own. I think it is great that they write something that can be seen by so many people that can also comment with their own thoughts and ideas. It also forces them to learn about the process of editing and understanding that when they write, they need to think of their text as something that will be seen by an audience.
While I think blogging is an excellent tool to get students to write, it is important to also emphasize the traditional writing process. That process involves three main phases: pre-writing, writing and post-writing. Blogging does touch upon all of these steps, it concentrates mostly on typing. Jim Burke would agree with me when he says typing and writing are different in his post from December 27th, 2010: http://jimburke.typepad.com/my_weblog/2010/12/typing-is-not-writing.html. While blogging requires students to use the whole writing process, it should be used as another tool but not the only tool.
Thanks for sharing that blog posting from Jim Burke - a very interesting connection!
ReplyDeleteGood point too about the idea of audience and how that changes the writing process for students.