This week’s preparation reading is written by Barrs and Horrocks and can be found here https://www.educationdevelopmenttrust.com/~/media/EDT/files/research/2014/r-blogging-2014.pdf
From reading how one teacher is using blogs how he believes is the correct way so it inspires children to want to respond, it has given me a great idea for my future practice. For a more creative way to setting homework, I could record myself giving the instructions whilst acting out a certain situation or pretending to be a character so that the children can fully understand what my expectations are for the task. This method of setting homework I believe is better because it assists children with EAL or poorer readers who may not understand the homework/classwork by reading a paragraph of instructional text. In this article it mentions the similarities when comparing children writing blogs and children writing in Literacy lesson, however in some tasks, using blogs can allow children to engage in the task in more unique manner. Children blogging from home can allow more independent thinking and also support from parents/carers to further understanding from a different point of view. The interactivity of blogs allows social interaction between a child and their peers and the teacher through commenting. I think compared to writing and commenting in children’s workbooks, blog commenting is more effective as it orders the comments and replies under one another.
The article argues how children enjoy writing stories the most, possibly from the openness and creative thinking it involves. Through blogging children can write and reflect on anything with a more unique method than in their workbooks. A teacher once told me “classroom workbooks are for Ofsted and learning is for children”. Even though this could be argued as a more extreme outlook on Ofsted’s involvement, I agree on some levels with children do not necessarily only learn through writing everything down however how can you prove or confirm children are learning without any evidence? When teachers were asked for this article what makes for good writing they responded with: “good content and ideas, real meaning and purpose, imagination, originality and creativity, fluency and momentum and a strong sense of a reader/audience”. Some teachers regarded the children’s blogs as something that does not need to be as critically assessed like literacy books for example, the teachers preferred to look at the content in the blog contained instead. The interesting finding in this article was that teachers believed they saw an improvement in the quality of writing as the school year progressed and more blogs were being written. But, ‘a London deputy headteacher wrote: ‘It didn’t quite have the benefit I was looking for in that way. I would like to say it has improved the quality of their writing but I can’t at present.’’
You have some interesting ideas here. Do you think you might engage in blogging with your future classes? If not, why not?
(It would be more fun to see some relevant images / videos to illustrate your ideas.)
I think in my future practice I will use blogging in the classroom as it is a great method of linking what happens in the classroom and continuing the learning at home.