Moodle is just a free, open-source Course Mgmt System. A distance-learning software, basically, with forums, assignments, quizzes, and that sort of thing.

If you want a tour, let me know and I can show you mine. It’s good for separating “school-ish” assignments like literature responses from authentic writing on blogs. Blogs belong to students, academic stuff belongs to Moodle–that’s the policy I’m aiming for, though I keep assigning lit responses as blog hw and violating my own policy.

Sorry if I misread you, by the way. Maybe I should have a cup of coffee before reading my bloglines and responding to stuff that interests me.

1) Never used Moodle. I’ll check it out, but first I’ll need to find out a little more about what it actually is.
Which brings me to
2) Not harshing “School 2.0″ as a concept–I just hate the term. Like I hate the term “blog” (sounds like something an Elizabethan barber-surgeon would try to remove, possibly with a leech). And “Moodle?” C’mon. We won’t get taken seriously if we’re pushing something like that.
3) “And yes, ASSESSING the blogs for development in the writing skills we’re paid to develop in students is, to me, fair game. Six Traits is the best way I’ve found to make that happen. ” yes I said yes I will Yes.

You write:
“Which brings me to the second conversation. One of my sophomores came to see me about her second quarter grade, which was pretty low. She couldn’t figure out why it was so low, so I explained to her that she was missing many blog entries, which I require as homework. Now, a couple of things happened right after I said that: She said that not only were there technical difficulties with learnerblogs, but that she and many of my other sophomores think that blogging is useless and “pretentious.” At the same time, I realized how counterproductive it was to force my students to blog on a schedule. I was grading them on their participation in something that I find valuable in my own learning (blogging) but in a way that doesn’t even work for me (posting by a deadline, rather than as I come up with things to write about). Long story short, I adjusted her grade but also made it clear that we’d continue to use the blogs for the rest of the year, albeit in a more productive/logical/useful way, TBD later.”

Learnerblogs did “suck,” as my kids (and I) put it, in Dec. and Jan. Still slow. Want tips?

If you use Moodle, try a “Learnerblogs Back-up Forum.” That way they can post to Moodle when LB is down.

I struggle with assigning teacher-dictated blog posts. If a teacher told you to write your homework in you personal journal, wouldn’t that ruin your journal?

So if you want students to warm to blogging, maybe the blogs should be about what…they care to write about, instead of what teacher does?

You can always make them respond to your literature interests on Moodle. If they’re really interested in the class stuff, they’ll choose to write about it in their free blogs anyway.

You’re an English teacher. You’re responsible for helping their writing develop. Holding them to deadlines, whether they like it or not (remember, they’re human, so they’re not generally going to like hw), is the only way I can see to ensure they practice writing.

Deadlines are authentic. We tend to become losers if we never meet them, in life, love, and work.

But “My Personal English Homework Blog”? Why would I care about my blog if I’m just answering teacher’s version of “End-of-Chapter Questions”?

But you already wrote yourself to this position when you wrote:

“Maybe the blogs need to be less academically focused? Maybe the student blogs need to be pushed to become more like the blogs I find myself reading–the ones with voice, the ones that are focused on the blogger’s interests. Maybe it’s okay, even more than okay, to have students just write about what they think is important–I’d be a hypocrite if I got mad a student who wrote about her favorite album like I did a little while ago.

I wonder–and this is the invitation for my sophomores to respond–if I need to just bury the whole blog-as-reading-journal model once and for all. Enough with the “post before and after you read” nonsense. Enough with the “comment on someone else’s blog for credit” malarkey. Enough with making the blogs as fake as the five-paragraph essay and as seemingly pointless as a quadratic equation. In my enthusiasm for the new technology, I’m afraid I’ve run roughshod over one of my basic beliefs about education–it has to be authentic to be important.”

I say amen to that. And blogs are the perfect place for it. And yes, ASSESSING the blogs for development in the writing skills we’re paid to develop in students is, to me, fair game. Six Traits is the best way I’ve found to make that happen. Over the rest of the year, my students will be expected to show growth in their selection of ideas and content, organization, voice, sentence fluency, word choice, conventions. If they don’t, I’ve failed.

But at least they get to work on these things writing about what THEY like, instead of what I do. Because let’s face it: they’re not all going to become English majors, any more than you became an algebra major.

But they might become music or film critics, lawyers, PR people, science writers, etc. Blogs are great for that.

It’s not “rah rah technology.” It’s rah rah authenticity and students connecting with other students outside the classrooms. It’s rah rah more than teacher reading what I write. It’s rah rah reading what other students think of me and my ideas and writing.

The technology is just a tool. It moves teacher out of the way. If/when you start using wikis (or letting your students), you’ll discover how much students can teach each other. It’ll be messy, yes; it’ll be imperfect (though less so the second time); but it’ll also be preferred–I’ve got student reflections that overwhelmingly demonstrate their preference for wikis for any process writing.

This is too long. It’s just there’s so much interesting stuff going on in your reflection. Skepticism is good. But not if it’s a show-stopper (I’m not saying yours is). Baby’s bathwater will always need changing.

To change metaphors (for another unoriginal one): wikis, blogs, etc are just new pencils and tablets (and really, they ARE just as easy to learn for kids), so your verb choice of “pushing” instead of just “giving” these new read-write tools to your kids is suggestive to me.

Or is it just a question of lightness? Is it me, or is there an air of brooding and struggle, of weight, that is arguably unnecessary in navigating these waters?

Final comment: I think I’ve read in earlier posts (I subscribe to you and read everything you write) that you use Moodle. Why not create a dummy user, give the dummy username and password to your students, and create an anonymous feedback forum? That way you’ll always hear student criticism–not just at blog-grading time. That feedback is good stuff. I post my students’ anonymous feedback on my blog. Sure, I get beat up, but what leader of crowds won’t? It helps.

Enjoyed your post.

Here is what I want to do with 6th grade blogging if I get to teach the grade again, which I might. And it, kind of, is on topic. In a very Sarah way. Okay only minimally on topic.

I was thinking about the creative piece, about inspiring students, about how the children I teach seem honestly excited by technology. So I want to build projects where they blog inside of an idea. And it’s a little about how I want to be a guide to turn them toward the material in a way that feeds an educational experience over a “Sponge Bob” time.

I’d like students to write on blogs about things that they “care” about. Sure. Not about flirtations and sadness though I did in 6th grade help them finally to set up a poetry project called “Everyone Knows I’m All About the Heart” when my kids poetry writing into hidden notebooks drove me to finally insist they share this way. But I filtered and over months, it was very good writing if you wanted to read essentially song lyrics that reminded me of angst-broken-hearts. You really could put them to music. No wild stuff allowed. They would go at recesses to add their new things to the blog.
It was a couple years ago and I had to do this just inside my own class due to blocking. But I saw if I could then include a poem a day from an author I contributed they slowly began to be able to talk about Sonnets and haiku and form. It became a kind of area in hyperspace that we had there as a piece of the puzzle of literacy.
I try to build these kinds of places. From interests.
This really came from my having 5 heart girls who were determined to address their “pain’. And I just decided to force Robert Browning and other writers into the scene.
That’s essentially the experiment I’ve been running for myself blogging. Writing from my interests, seeing the pitfalls. And if I learn anything or stretch at all. I began thinking about daily life in my classroom. Writing anecdotally. I’ve yet to see many future “thinkers” about the new age of education kind of “get” what 1st grade is like. Or sound like they consider a student or “students’. It seems plastic. This first grade year is of course where you leave home and enter the institution. The homes and families my children leave often carry desperation, issues of poverty, crime, hunger, extremely poor health care and so I spend a great deal of time being a loving support system that has to motivate and has to care so much that the child gets connected into learning as a positive life force value. Well in 6th graders I saw the same need, oddly, the need to learn how to care, and in teens I worked with again, the need to learn how to care. How to be a positive force, always the issue, how to take control of your own education. How to be in the moment as a “me” who can play the education game to one’s own advantage. To build a great me. How to connect purpose and to find a way to be. Yes I know this is easily made fun of. And written in fragments. Yes I get that.

But just the same I had blogging ideas. When we studied the Greeks in 6th it was so much fun to blog as a character in the Greek pantheon (assigned or chosen by the students) as they created a page being that god or goddess. So they could chose fonts, styles and maintain the daily entries as someone else. And they had to read and figure out so much to maintain character.I had to work hard to keep it reasonable but it worked. Hi, I’m Hera and I’m blogging about the man I love….kind of gets to me to recall how much editing I did…but the writing was really great as they had to source things and read within many types of sources. It was just as interesting when they had to blog as an animal. Cheetah’s News and Views…. lots of silly humor in these pieces at times but it could also just as easily be serious.Lots of reading and work to create. I built projects obviously. Frames to hold the blogging into something other than just what I’m feeling.

I kind of thought today…maybe in English it might be neat to either become a literary character blogging or be an author blogging and perhaps even finding a way to blog to each other in character. I’d love to try to blog as Hemingway. So…I start to apply creative angles into the experiences.

Another thing I’d like is a response journal. I liked this teaching my entire career. I’d write, they’d write. I see this could really expand blogging. Basically I’d ask questions to initiate this and it would expand. Tell me about you first plane ride, where do you go when you leave school….it’s possible this is too social for your context.

I like the idea of blogging for a month on a “subject’. I’m trying that with Black history but imagine getting to do this on something like “peace” or “imagination”. Of course I always am inspired by the possibilities.

Some people will narrow this. It’ll be like TV was if not careful, so now we have 100 channels and nothing on. And all the reasons why the great programs can’t be made and lousy reality shows replacing creative constructs. Sad.

I had such fun searching blogs on bird watching. They don’t debate the future of bird watching blogs. They just create the most inspiring blogs about so many angles of the construct. I think sometimes there is a giant walk away from the beauty of content. And math…I love the beauty of math. My apologies to anyone who feels I’m a dope, but mathematics on the internet and in so many sites is just mind bending. So again, just think of an angle. I like geometry.

You should write about music more often. It’s a very real piece of who you are and reveals a great deal about your thinking. And makes me want to blog about Love Supreme…and other pieces I love. A connection. Student to teacher. Or in this case little old lady to teacher. Sorry this didn’t say too much. well it’s a very interesting subject.