In the Classroom, Web Logs Are the New Bulletin Boards

LAST spring, when Marisa L. Dudiak’s second-grade class in Frederick County, Md., returned from a field trip to a Native American farm, all the students wanted to do was talk about what they saw. But instead of leading a discussion about the trip, Mrs. Dudiak had the students sign on to their classroom Web log.

By JEFFREY SELINGO

There they wrote about learning to use a bow and arrow, sitting inside a tepee and petting a buffalo. The short entries were typical of second-grade writing, with misspelled words and simple sentences. Still, for Mrs. Dudiak, the exercise proved more fruitful than a group discussion or a handwritten entry in a personal journal.

"It allowed them to interact with their peers more quickly than a journal," she said, "and it evened the playing field." Mrs. Dudiak said she found that those who were quiet in class usually came alive online.

Classroom Web logs, or blogs, many of which got their start in the last school year, are becoming increasingly popular with teachers like Mrs. Dudiak as a forum for expression for students as young as the second-grade level and in almost any subject. In the blogs, students write about how they attacked a tough math problem, post observations about their science experiments or display their latest art projects.

For teachers, blogs are attractive because they require little effort to maintain, unlike more elaborate classroom Web sites, which were once heralded as a boon for teaching. Helped by templates found at sites like tblog.com and movabletype.org, teachers can build a blog or start a new topic in an existing blog by simply typing text into a box and clicking a button.

Such ease of use is the primary reason that Peter Grunwald, an education consultant, predicts that blogs will eventually become a more successful teaching tool than Web sites.

"School Web sites are labor-intensive and are left up to administrators and teachers," said Mr. Grunwald, whose consulting firm in Washington focuses on the technology link between home and school. "With blogging intended to be a vehicle for students, the labor is built in. The work that is required to refresh and maintain an interesting blog is being provided by students."

One way teachers say they use blogs is to continue spirited discussions that were cut short or to prolong question-and-answer periods with guest speakers.

"With blogs, class doesn’t have to end when the bell rings," said Will Richardson, supervisor of instructional technology and communications at Hunterdon Central Regional High School in Flemington, N.J., who maintained blogs for two journalism classes he taught last year.

Teachers say that the interactivity of blogs allowed them to give students feedback much more quickly than before.

"I used to have this stack of hard-copy journals on my desk waiting to be read," said Catherine Poling, an assistant principal at Kemptown Elementary School, also in Frederick County, Md., who ran a blog last year when she taught third grade at a nearby school. "Now I can react to what they say immediately, and students can respond to each other."

In one blog entry, for instance, Ms. Poling asked her students what qualities they looked for when rating books for a statewide award. When several students responded that a book has to be creative and grab their attention, she posted a follow-up question asking them if they used the same criteria for both fiction and nonfiction books.

While such a question could have just as easily been posed during a classroom conversation, teachers who use blogs say that students put a lot more thought and effort into their blog writing, knowing that parents and others may read their work on the Web.

"They want to make sure that it’s good enough to be read by more than just their teacher," said Christopher S. Wright, a third grade teacher at Wyman Elementary School in Rolla, Mo.

Sometimes, the long reach of the Web has turned bloggers into modern-day pen pals, allowing students to collaborate easily with their peers in other classes or even other countries. Some social studies classes at Hunterdon Central Regional High School in Flemington, for instance, are using a blog to study the Holocaust with high school students in Krakow, Poland.

One of the goals of classroom blogs, advocates say, is to get students to write more often. Even so, according to the time stamps on classroom blogs, they are most heavily used during the school day. Few entries seem to come after school hours, and some teachers who have tried to keep their blogs going during the summer say they have been disappointed by the results. "I’m not getting a huge response," said Mrs. Dudiak, the second grade teacher in Frederick County.

That has led some teachers who are critical of blogs to question wonder the technology has actually done anything to interest students in writing. Critics also worry that the casual nature of writing on the Web may encourage bad habits that are hard to break, like e-mail-style abbreviations, bad grammar and poor spelling.

While some teachers who run blogs encourage students to write out their entries on paper first and then post them online as if they were publishing the work, others view blog writing as more free-flowing.

"Blogging is a different form of writing," Mrs. Dudiak said. "They should proofread, but we are more concerned about the content, not grammar."

It is unclear exactly how many teachers maintain blogs. Mr. Richardson estimates their numbers in the thousands. The Educational Bloggers Network, a loosely organized clearinghouse, lists only about 130 members at its Web site, http://www.ebn .weblogger.com. Whatever the number, the ranks of bloggers are likely to grow in the coming school year.

In some cases, teachers may not have much of a choice. The Little Miami School District near Cincinnati plans to require teachers to maintain blogs for their classes once they are trained on the technology, which should be completed sometime in the 2005-6 school year.

Debbi Contner, an assistant principal at one of the district’s six schools, Hamilton-Maineville Elementary, who used a blog when she taught fourth grade at the school last year, said that teachers become receptive to blogs once they see how easy it is to set one up.

"If it gets kids excited about learning," Mrs. Contner said, "we might as well try it."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company