Students coming up into my secondary school are ace school bloggers. The elementary class blogs represent class learning, individual reflection and shared interests at their best. These blogs reach a wider audience, including people relevant to topics of inquiry. The students reflect a genuine enjoyment of this style of writing and, more importantly, a culture of commenting on each other\u2019s thoughts.<\/p>\n
The downfall of the blog <\/strong><\/p>\n As they make their way through secondary school, our model is clearly failing as I see students becoming progressively disinterested and unmotivated to blog. The reasons behind this, as I see them, are:<\/p>\n 1) Logistics – In secondary school we do not have one consistent class \u2013 classes are split into a range of groups – from arbitrary letters to House groups, interest and\/or ability. As a result, the close knit group of students involved in one shared experience with one central teaching figure no longer exists.<\/p>\n 2) Size – Year level blog posts become too large and unwieldy, a subject class blog becomes ineffective (unless there is a very strong related project) which means that innumerable student school blogs become the unfortunate norm. As a result, it becomes very difficult for a blog to rise up from the mire.<\/p>\n 3) Motivation – Students soon become unmotivated to complete these because the content is prescribed by teachers as part of a digital portfolio (or more often than not ignored as a medium by teachers).<\/p>\n 4) Audience \u2013 Parents and a few teachers do not make a credible audience. The lack of an authentic audience provides no opportunities for the much needed dialogue with others; which is what essentially makes blogging so rewarding.<\/p>\n Blogging with passion <\/strong><\/p>\n To overcome these problems first requires the school to recognise that a blog without passion and\/or an audience should not be described as a \u2018blog\u2019 and should not be enforced by anyone – on anyone. I would like to see the school provide the time, space and support for students to produce blogs on topics of interest. I am even happy for groups with similar interest to run a shared blog. All I want is to find a practical way for student to express themselves and be part of a wider dialogue and to enjoy that experience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Students at my secondary school use a blog (set up and organised by the school) to organise their digital portfolios and I think this does a disservice to both blogs and portfolios alike. Ace elementary bloggers Students coming up into my secondary school are ace school bloggers. The elementary class blogs represent class learning, individual […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogs","count-0","even alt","author-neilcommons","last"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/neilcommons.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/neilcommons.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/neilcommons.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/neilcommons.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/neilcommons.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=328"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/neilcommons.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":330,"href":"http:\/\/neilcommons.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328\/revisions\/330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/neilcommons.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/neilcommons.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/neilcommons.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/leedsbloggers.files.wordpress.com\/2012\/09\/bloggers.jpg\")
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