Increasing Literacy; Reflecting on a Blog Pilot Project

Donohoo, J. (2006, May). Increasing literacy; reflecting on a blog pilot project. Learning and Leading with Technology, 34-35. ISTE: Eugene, OR.

The Article
     Increasing Literacy by Jenni Donohoo recounts her experience in using blogging as a tool to help students expand their literacy skills. Her purpose in writing the article is to show how one can utilize new technology and effectively apply it to a classroom, for language arts in particular. She structures her article by first explaining what she did, how it benefited her students, and by then offering tips to any teacher who is interested in this kind of class project. Donohoo is concise and recognizes some of the difficulties teachers might face, especially of accessibility to computers and privacy options on blogging sites. This thoughtfulness makes her article more enjoyable and more effective, as she approached the blogging project realistically. She kept it simple and was able to maximize results for her students. 

     Donohoo partnered up with another teacher for the blogging project, and she recommends partnering up with a like-minded teacher who will have the same goals as you (she even encourages cross-curriculum aspects of the project). The project she used consisted of her setting up a special blog for her classroom. She used it mainly as a forum for discussion, where students posted there according to the prompts she put up. In other classrooms, the students collaborated with classmates and students from another school for the assignments. Studying the conventions of stories and creating examples of their own to be critiqued by their peers was one way of how to utilize blogging in the classroom. Another was partnering up classes and allowing the students to post their analysis of a quote, then share it and discuss it with others. Donohoo stresses setting up guidelines on appropriate blogging, which I found very reasonable. She stresses proper adherence to grammar and spelling. She also writes about the significance improving literacy (the language arts kind) with technological literacy. The relationship is extremely relevant to the students' daily lives and makes it an engaging way to improve writing and written communication skills.

 Personal Response and NETS
     As a future language arts teacher, I truly enjoyed reading an article that is closely related to what I would like to work on with technology. The challenge that I have thought about with technology and classroom instruction is how to appropriately apply it to the curriculum and standards for language arts. Donohoo provides great examples of this, and I am interested in finding out more ways to approach language arts in a modern way. Reading and writing is oftentimes considered boring by students, but encouraging professionalism through blogging may be a good way to engage them in work that will be interesting as well as useful for them. I think other ways that blogging may be applied to language arts class could be to have students develop a story and then exchange it electronically and have other students review it. Working more with poetry would also be a way to step outside of the traditional read and respond way that poetry can be discussed and learned about in the classroom.

     The work that this article describes addresses most of the student NETS standards. In particular, it addresses standard 2-Communication and Collaboration through the introduction of blogging to students. They are taught to interact with each other appropriately and digitally, using technology tools that are not traditionally learned in school. Also, it applies to standard 1-Creativity and Innovation because it encourages students to apply what they know about language arts to a real-world medium and work creatively with it. Using a blogging site, students are no longer limited to pencil and paper, but to a plethora of resources that can enhance a writing project through new resources and access to distinct points of view. Finally, this article shows how effective blogging is for students with standard 3-Research and Information Fluency. Students are learning to how to use new media for a specific purpose in language arts, and exploring the different functions of blogging as well as the connection between classroom literacy and real world skills.