The Polliwog Journal

For awhile I thought that FrontPage would kill CyberEnglish in the same way that video killed the radio star.

We’d been using FrontPage as the web editor for our students to create their websites since 2001, but FP is no longer supported by Microsoft. Also, our server was a Microsoft system set up to do live editing on the server, and if we moved to an open source web editor, we’d need to find some way to ftp pages, or whatever the lingo is for publishing. Also, our security is tight. We adhere to the extremely stringent Wisconsin Open Records Law in our school, so whatever new tool we decided to use, it would have to keep us in line with the law.

I have wanted to move to blogs for quite awhile,  and a convergence of factors this year propelled us somewhat last minute to do just that.

We installed WordPress MU on a local server (when I say we, I don’t mean me). My CE9 colleague and I and a brilliant technology teacher in our district worked on customizations. It has taken us awhile to manage it all, but this week our students were blogging like crazy. And they love it.

Moving to WP MU and blogs did give us some advantages over websites:

• Students can login to their blogs from any Internet computer. They can create new posts and submit for review. This means they aren’t “confined” to the school building or the school day to accomplish their goals. This is great for students who need more time as well as for students who are absent. Students could not edit their websites from home.
• I can edit my classroom blog anytime. I can only edit my www.mshogue.com website from home. Sometimes I want to publish up-to-the-minute announcements. I can use my blog for that.
• Peers, teachers, parents, mentors, or anyone, can post comments on our blogs. This is one of the main reasons I wanted to move from static websites to blogs. Comments connect us. When students generate content (a book review or a journal post) and publish it, a comment means someone has read their work and is engaging in conversation about it. This means a lot to them and for me continues to drive a wedge into our old idea of audience. I want student to write for everyone, not for me, so that eventually, they’ll write for themselves.
• As the teacher, I have much more administrative control over the blogs than I did over the websites. This is nice for our tech specialists. They don’t need to devote as much time to us as in the past. On the downside, it means I devote a lot more time. C’est la vie, I guess. No system is perfect.

There are some disadvantages to using Blogs over Websites:

• A blog is a truly linear looking format, whereas students websites were a bit more fluent. That is, there was a more natural “back and forth” linkability in the websites. This class of 2013 has not had the Website experience, though, so they don’t know the difference. They love their blogs.
• Our students can only edit posts and pages prior to publishing. They cannot go back to revise once a page or post is published (made public). This is a tremendous disadvantage in teaching a recursive writing process, but is a fact we have to live with due to the law. Because of this situation, students are encouraged to compose in Word first, to run spell check, to share with peers when needed, or teachers when needed–all before submitting for review. The blue submit for review button is one we only click after serious consideration. I’ve told my students that they don’t want their work wandering out in the world sleepy-headed  in its jammies. They want what they write to go out in public well dressed with its hair combed and its face fresh. They get the idea. We will work hard on knowing when to push the blue button.
• There are limits to how much students can customize. This is good and bad. I like how their websites of the past were truly unique. I’ve had over 500 CE0 students in the past and each student created an individual website. No two were the same. This is not so with blogs. This year, students can choose from about 20 themes. We upload the themes for them to choose from; they can’t go out and get their own. We will try to add more later, so the choice is wider. Most students are happy with the variety of themes. Others wish they had one all their own or that they could customize their theme.  The upside of this limitation is that students really won’t have a reason to play around with customizing, which some did to a distracting degree in years past. It is true that messing with code is good play because we can learn a lot from doing it. But if our goals are to write and communicate, then the theme is secondary to that.
• Getting things set up in the beginning took an incredible amount of time, probably 30 hours, no joke. In the future, this work could be done in the summer, not during the school day like this year. Also, in the future we won’t have to learn as we go or create lessons as we go. We’ve already done this–next year should be a breeze.

Right now, despite the time it takes to review and publish, I am pleased with the change. What’s more important, my students love blogging. Their cyberjournals sound a lot like their peers’ from the “old days,” which means that while the tools have changed, the pedagogy has not. We still learn best by making it public, by passing it on, and by peer review.