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Student Blogging, Student Voice

The following is a response to a challenge from the totally amazing Noah Geisel, after he wrote a post about finding that authentic audience for student publishing. I shared his post via a tweet touting success in this arena... and then he blasted me and asked me to share a blog post about this success. So here we go...

I have been a blogger, inconsistently, for about 3 years. In this time I have had several thousand readers take time to read my thoughts as I butcher my way through the mechanics of the writing process. I write like I speak. It's hard to follow sometimes, but alas, my readers keep coming back for more.

I really started having fun watching my analytics rise each week. Two years ago, I decided to answer a bloggers challenge. The blog was to answer the 5 things we should stop pretending in education. I asked 4 of my students to write an answer and I wrote one of them as well. This post received over 1000 clicks in a month. I was elated. The students were over the moon giddy with the power of a Twitter share. That is when I got the idea that the very next school year I would have my students do their weekly essays/daily writing assignments in Blogger.

It was a rough beginning. It took far more time to teach the blogging process than I thought it would. I literally thought my 4th and 5th graders would pick it up after one lesson and then we would blog our way to happiness for the rest of the year. Boy, was I wrong. I would say that for the first month it was touch and go. Things like bolding, underlining, linking and font styles were not things I had worried about before in writing but now were very important to cover in the blogosphere.

Once we were on a roll and well into our second month of posts...I only required one post per week per student...we started looking at the analytics of their posts. Most had about 5 to 6 reads per week. This alone was very fun for them. Their parents were sharing the posts with family and family members were taking an interest. How many writing assignments that get sent home are probably shared amongst the family? I would venture to say 1%...maybe.

In our second month of this adventure, I decided I would share a post per week out on my Twitter. We would vote as a class - picking a student to highlight. It wasn't always the best mechanically written posts that were voted on. We had a few very poorly written posts that were impressively creative and they were chosen based on the fun or creative content. The students followed their analytics like crazy after that because posts that were getting 5-6 views were now in the 20's and 30's. And guess what, something amazing started to happen. I had kids that hated writing... I mean loathed to write...I mean would rather get throw-up sick than think and write on paper...they started to look forward to it. They began asking what they were going to write about next week. I even had a kiddo call me on the weekend and ask if I minded him writing and posting without a writing prompt.
"Ummmm, sure kiddo. You go for it!"
The kids were hooked. Their passion for writing might have originally been motivated by going digital, which for these grade levels is anti-state testing. I have been questioned about the practices here by teachers worried that I am setting myself up for failure because these kids need to write on paper to be successful on the written portion of the Reading exam. To that, I stick my fingers to my nose and wave them back and forth. Who cares about that test when I have students excited about writing? Who cares. We are about to dive back into the adventure again this school year. Due to restrictions placed on our school Google domain, we haven't got access to Blogger yet. As soon as our status changes, you can bet I will share away on the Twittersphere again. And you, my readers and Edufriends, you should read what they have to say too.

Here are links to several students blog sites...they might resemble your old pal Erin's site just a bit. They are not all perfect, but to my students, they are a voice out in the world now. Go. Read their work. Make comments. Subscribe to their material.

http://educatingamanda.blogspot.com/
http://educatingevan.blogspot.com/
http://educatinghugo.blogspot.com/
http://educatingtate.blogspot.com/
http://poloman123.blogspot.com/ 


The challenge: Try this with your students, kids, youth group, an afterschool program. Student voice shouldn't be - just another buzz word.

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