Preparing for Paris: Engaging the Bloggers

I’ve used class blogs with several groups of students, but I’ve never been happy with the results.

When asked, my students say they like the blogs, in fact last year most of my Y9 ICT class immediately went online and opened their class blog at the start of each lesson. They loved using embedded slideshows and videos (not surprising – the videos were rather excellent, being mostly Commoncraft’s Plain English explanations) and they complained if there was nothing new on the blog. The blog was pretty useful, but it was really just a vehicle for conveying instructions: you need to do a, b and c to pass this task; this is how to do a, b and c.

I’ve found that getting students to engage with blogs in a more active way is much harder. Asking them to rate posts produced the first signs of resistance, there were surprisingly few takers. Almost no-one wanted to leave a comment. Moving on a step and asking students to write posts of their own will present real challenges.

I don’t think my students are in any way unusual. They enjoy online gaming, are active users of Facebook and spend hours chatting online, so you might assume that asking them to use a blog or wiki for learning would be something quite normal and natural, but evidently it isn’t.

I’ve been pondering the many reasons behind this for a while, but when Kevin Jarrett tweeted links to articles about the 90-9-1 rule, it really helped me to clarify some ideas. After reading this* I started thinking, especially about the suggestions for minimising the problem. (*You might like to follow that link before continuing.)

If I apply the 90-9-1 rule to a class of 30 students, I can expect maybe 2 or 3 of them to be intermittent contributors and one (if I’m lucky) to be a regular contributor. The figures may not be exact, but that’s not really important, it still means that the majority are happy to be passive consumers – which is exactly what I have experienced so far. Put in this context, the fact that one Y9 student left several comments and and another 4 or 5 rated posts or sent me a couple of emails doesn’t seem so bad, but it’s still not the level of engagement that I was aiming for.

I agree that I can’t remove this discrepancy in participation, but as a teacher it is essential that I find ways of minimising it, otherwise I’m simply creating a pretty website that has no real impact on learning.

We are hoping to use a blog on our Paris trip next July. The students all know about it, but getting them to start contributing is – as always – going to be a challenge. My aim is to have a group of students who are reasonably competent and confident bloggers by the time we set off on the trip. So how am I going to try to maximise participation?

Here’s my plan:

1. From past experience I know that students are very unlikely to use our Paris blog outside school unless they’ve already used it inside school, so starting next term we are going to have some blogging sessions during tutor time (registration). I will be meeting up with small groups of the students who are going on the Paris trip and helping them to create their first posts. Hopefully once the students have published something, they will start to feel some ownership of the blog.
2. I’m including polls and I’m going to add a rating function, so students can easily leave feedback with one click. I’ve noticed that many students don’t like to be the first to rate or vote on something, so I’ll vote first (a bit like the approach of a busker who puts the first coins in their own hat). I’ll be encouraging students to leave feedback on each other’s posts during in-school sessions.
3. Our school sessions will include commenting on other students’ posts. Obviously I’m going to leave comments as well; I’m hoping that I can persuade some other teachers and parents to join in.

Will it work? I hope so. If anyone has any advice or suggestions, I’d be very happy to hear from you.