Blogs are becoming teachers’ little helpers

MOUNT VERNON, Wash. – Every day, at the end of her day, Lincoln Elementary teacher Martha Thornburgh e-mails a daily update to her blog. She details what her students have done that day and the homework they’re supposed to finish for the next day.

It’s easy. And it takes three or four minutes.

A blog – short for “Web log” – is, in a sense, an online journal where people can post thoughts, political commentary, news links and, often, salacious gossip. Blogspot.com, a free Internet site that boasts hundreds of thousands of users worldwide, is a favorite among a growing number of Skagit County teachers who are using blogs as teaching tools and to chronicle their lives. Last year, Thornburgh’s students posted responses to a reading blog.

“I’ve seen how easy it is for kids to publish their work,” Thornburgh said. “They’re so proud of what they’ve done.”

Thornburgh, an admitted tech junkie, uses blogging to learn about teachers around the world. A traveling teacher herself – she has lived in Indonesia, Kenya and Ecuador – blogging is a way for her to stay globally connected.

“I have learned a lot from other teachers’ blogs and what they’re doing,” she said. “Not just how to blog, but I’ve learned about what other teachers are doing in their classes and how to incorporate what they’re doing in my class.”

Thornburgh got hooked on blogging after taking a blogging workshop with Annette Lamb, the guru of bloggers and a professor of library and information science at Indiana University.

“Many teachers are exploring blogs as personal and professional tools,” Lamb said. “However, only a few are devoting the time and effort it takes to keep an ongoing blog. It’s more likely that teachers will use blogs for short-term projects, homework sites and collaborative projects.”

Lamb said nonbloggers often think of blogs as a cold and unseemly place for people to connect. She wants to erase that notion.

“People often hear the bad things about emerging social technologies such as social networking and blogging without realizing the many positive ways these tools can be used in writing and collaborative learning,” Lamb said.

Filters have been installed at most schools in Skagit County, making accessing blogging Web sites impossible.

But some teachers want to connect their students to the bright side of the Web.

Jennifer Bradbury, an English teacher at Burlington-Edison High School, said she’s going to use a blog to coax along classroom discussion.

She’s teaching advanced language and composition next year and is asking her students to use a blog to respond to readings and to each other’s posts.

“I think that using the blog is going to give us a new dimension with a variety of kids’ voices,” Bradbury said.

Bradbury started using a blog last year, as a Fulbright Exchange teacher in India.

“I was looking for ways to communicate the Fulbright Exchange with friends, family and students,” Bradbury said. “I wanted people to learn about India.”

Anacortes High teacher Brian Backman has challenged himself to post one English lesson a day to his blog – creating 365 lessons on the history of the English language.

“It forces me to make a connection between history and language,” Backman said. “It also gets me writing a little bit every day. As a teacher, you spend your time doing so much teaching, that you often don’t get a chance to write.”

Backman got the idea to blog from his 7-year-old son Max, who keeps a blog about the goings-on in his and his cat’s life.

Backman intends to turn the blog entries into a book. He’s published two books so far – “Building Sentence Skills” and more recently, “Thinking in Threes,” a book about writing essays.

Since late March, Backman has posted around 100 lessons to his blog, named “The Word Lover’s Almanac” ( www.worddaze.blogspot.com). Among his favorite posts is one from May 21, titled, “Defenestration Day.” The entry reads:

“The word is defenestration which means: The act of throwing something or someone out the window. Just before the beginning of The Thirty Years War, a war in which Roman Catholics and Protestants battled for political and religious power, Protestant nobles threw two members of the Roman Catholic royal council and their secretary from a window in Hradcany Castle in Prague. The good news concerning this momentous defenestration is that no one was hurt.”

For now, Backman’s blogs are just for him. But he believes his students would benefit from writing a blog.

“I can see a time down the road when every kid is doing a blog,” he said. “They would post all the different types of writing. It’s a very real way of publishing and getting feedback for your writing.”