Blog as Storytelling

Prepared is best, but underprepared is always better than overprepared.
— Jesse Stommel (@Jessifer) February 19, 2014

Newman and I had our students create blogs this year as a way to practice formative writing that accounts for an authentic audience and prepares students for success in summatively assessed writing. For example, if we were ultimately going to write a compare/contrast paper, students would first practice the skills of comparing/contrasting on their blog.

In addition, a key part of the blog assignment is giving students a chance to think about their learning.  The blog functions as a place to practice writing, but it is also used to post summative assignments and reflections. In this way, the blog captures a student's work for the class in one place, provides an authentic audience, and requires other design decisions as students consider the genre of blogging.

Basically, the blog acts as a platform for formative practice and as a hub or portfolio for publishing a student's work from throughout the year.

Our students have done some pretty amazing work. They've designed blogs that show genre awareness, they've practiced the skills for a unit in various ways, and they've created some strong final assessments.

The truth is, though, that if you would have asked me last summer if I thought the blogs would look like they do and that we would have been able to do all of the things mentioned above, I wouldn't have had any idea what you were talking about.

Children, Digital Literacy, Girl Talk, Remix, and a Timeless Essay from 1988 via Frank Smith

Anecdote
As I was putting my just-turned-two daughter to bed last night she asked me, as she always does, to read "Pooh."  She loves this book because it is just an encyclopedia with various pictures of animals and we get to look at the animals and talk about how they are different from one another. 

Side note: My daughter refers to the book as "Pooh" because, in infinite marketing genius, the publishers simply splatter pictures of Winnie the Pooh and friends at various corners of the page, making it irresistible to children.

When I was done reading "Pooh," and put my daughter in her crib, she asked me to give her a collection of books that she loves to read called Gigi.  She has asked for these books before, but I never thought much of it.  Of course, at this age, by read, I mean look at pictures and talk about what she sees.                          

But, what was different this time is that I noticed--after standing in the hallway and listening to her talk about the pictures--she was making up a story as she went along by combining what she thought happens in the various books in the set, at least according to the pictures.

I was excited to hear her jabbering on about Gigi's friend and daddy, how they weren't able to wear the dress they wanted to, and there was probably something about having to go to time out. 

The Kiddos

My daughter was mimicking what she has heard my wife and me say, and she was using that language that she had picked up along the way to give the pictures in her little books meaning.  This activity wasn't strange to her.  As far as she knew, she was reading.

This experience reminded me of Frank Smith's collection of essays, Joining the Literacy Club, published back in 1988.  I went back and reread his opening essay and have some thoughts about how Smith's ideas about reading and writing apply to my much older students.

Specifically, I'm curious about how Smith's insights inform students' understanding of technology and its relationship to reading and writing.