To Blog or Not to Blog?

[Editor’s note: MsB is the pseudonym for a third-year high school English teacher in Brooklyn.]

My creative writing class is a slice of happiness in the midst of tests. It is the only pressure free class I have, and I take full advantage of that.

We were writing stories, plays and narratives and I began to think about what these kids write every day. They don’t write creative fiction on a daily basis. Creativity, I think, is something that we all should incorporate into our everyday lives.

These kids are technology crazy. It consumes them. They all are on some kind of website where they can write blogs and keep in touch with friends through e-mails. They spend hours on their computers every day.

I decided to use this to my advantage. They should learn how to write e-mails and blogs and still be creative in doing so. Yahoo! offers a free service similar to MySpace and Facebook called 360°. Here, as a teacher, I can set up a private online community for me and my students. I decided to try it. I made my own page that was all about the creative writing class and even made my little teacher avatar. I wrote a blog explaining to the class the purpose of this site and how we would all stay in touch. Then, I e-mailed them all asking them to join my private online community.

Their first assignment was to create their page and avatar. I didn’t have high expectations. I thought there would be problems with the e-mails, or they wouldn’t know how to create their profile, and they definitely wouldn’t keep up with writing their thoughts and homework on a blog.

The next day I went on the site to check off who had done the assignment. To my surprise most of the class had not only made their profiles, but had created blogs and even commented on other people’s blogs. I thought to myself, “this is actually going to work.” I had blogs from kids that never speak in class that were really long and very well written. Writing online makes them feel more comfortable and free I guess. This is what they are used to. The internet is their entire world.

We talked about this in class. What is it about the internet and writing blogs and e-mails that makes everyone less inhibited? It seemed like everyone didn’t mind writing long blogs, but did mind writing long homeworks. Is it just that it is less personal? It is clearly less formal. We had an entire debate on whether blogs and e-mails should be grammatically correct. Is it ok to substitute the word ‘u’ for ‘you’ just because it is a blog?

This led to an even better discussion on if blogs are making the standards of the English Language obsolete. This is what I wanted to help them with. Since they are writing online every day, they should still get in the habit of writing using correct spelling and grammar. By writing my blogs everyday, hopefully this will transfer over to the other things they write.

My students continue to blog every day. They run into class asking what the next topic for the blog is going to be, or they talk about what everyone else wrote or whose profile they really like. When I wrote my next blog, again, I didn’t think they would all read it. The next day, I look to see that my profile had been viewed 300 times! They all wrote comments and testimonials about me.

Now the hard part was making sure it stayed focused and remained a useful tool for teaching, instead of just social time. Since they had to type up the plays they have been writing for weeks, I had them post scenes from their plays on their page. Their assignment was to read someone’s scene and help them improve it. They loved this even more! Yet I guarantee if we had done this same activity in class, it would not have been as effective. I was allowing them to read on their own time in the comfort of their own home and, again, typing up the comments was apparently better for them. They read each other’s work and really wanted to help them fix it up, grammar and all! It has brought them closer as a class and it really feels like they have a strong connection now.

We will continue using this site for the rest of the semester, and hopefully I can extend this to more of my classes. The possibilities are endless. Finally, homework they don’t mind doing because it doesn’t interfere with their everyday routine. So off I go to check my e-mails, write a blog, and post comments to my students. C U L8R. Lol.

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