Post 2 : Blog Readings

I started by looking at the blog about assigning homework by Mr. Meyer. One thing that I liked about his blog is that he included links to back up some of the things he was saying. For example, he mentioned "assessment reform" and had a link to the site he was referencing. This is better than reading a term paper where the students have works cited because with one click, you're there. Of course for books and other sources that are not on the web, there is no replacement for the works cited. Still, that saved a lot of time and guesswork. I clicked and read exactly what he was talking about. On the other hand, he used offensive language in some of his blogs and I found that unprofessional. The blog definitely had a "conversational" tone that detracted from his credibility. It's not that we're all saints who would never swear, but in a presentation, swearing is a turn-off. There are better ways to express frustration without making a negative impact.

The next site I visited was about brevity written by a student, Morgante Pell. I can sympathize with students to a degree here. Yes, writing a long paper is no fun and it's sometimes difficult to try to come up with more information if they haven't done their research. Finding more to say to fill up space is basically how the student viewed the work for the traditional paper. I liked the comment from this teacher about how testing constraints limit the students' creativity. In my own classroom, I find that students try to write too much and they lack the vocabulary at levels 1 & 2. I think the idea of brevity is definitely useful and should be practiced. Brevity cannot replace all assignments, but getting to the point is a valuable idea.

Joyce Valenza has good points. She doesn't have as much practical information as I'd like, so the posts are a valuable follow-up to her article. What she has here is more like an outline of a study without the particulars. I found the posts to have good comments about what they've seen in PowerPoints that made for good and bad presentations. This is definitely a good site to show students before doing a presentation.


Kris Bradburn wrote an interesting article. I noticed that there were a lot of short comments in the posts showing support, but little else. The responses were often without any real content such as links to other research or any real depth of thought. This would be a good site to show "blogging illiteracy." If I were giving grades for responses to the original post, I would have to give the majority of responses failing grades. There is no real sense in saying "nice job!" if that's all you have to say to an article. All that does is clutter up the site.

The Fischbowl was the last one I looked at. This was interesting because it does not include people's opinions on the blog. Responses may be looked at by clicking a link to the comments. This makes the site look clean and neat. When I clicked on 21cliteracy as a suggested label, I got a hodgepodge of unrelated articles. I don't see how this was helpful in finding more information about the original topic on tech illiteracy. I did like how he had links for other posts he made since if a person likes what the writer has to say, it's easy to see what other comments or original posts he has.

I think that blogs definitely have good social uses. I'm still not convinced about replacing classroom discussion in favor of blogs. Also, I do not support replacing papers with blog-style commentaries since our society is turning away from structured writing in disturbing ways. I've seen e-mails from my mom's work... they're scary. One of my former colleagues would print out e-mails from secretaries, other teachers, the principal, and others that he received and would share/ridicule them over lunch. That makes for a fun lunch, but I would not want my child anywhere near those people's classrooms. In sum, I can see benefits, but there are some definite drawbacks to the style of blog writing as well as the information itself. These examples were nice and from an educational website. Others can use blogs to perpetuate ignorance and intolerance. Like everything, you have to research before you read to see if your source is credible.

I think the most useful way to apply a blog for my classroom would be for tutoring. Many of my students say they would not be able to come in early (bus riders) or stay late (usually bus riders or they're just lazy). They realize they need help, but won't do anything about it. I'd bet a blog would be a good place for them to get help because I could have an original post about the grammar of the week and students could post their own explanations of how they learned the concept or share study techniques.