Student Blogging: A New Way of Teaching

Blogging has brought writing into an entirely new arena. It used to be that aspiring writers wrote their hearts out with futile hopes of ever having their writing shared with a mass audience, a plethora of fans. These days, blogging has allowed anyone with a computer and the desire to become a published writer with instant access to a world of readers. As a high school English teacher, blogging has allowed me to inspire my students with an interest in writing that they never had before.

Last year, I got my feet wet and engaged my students in blogging for the first time. I knew that I wanted to incorporate blogging into the curriculum somehow, but to be honest, I was really winging it. I set up free classroom blog sites using 21classes.com. At the time, 21classes offered free student blog sites to teachers with a max amount of users of 50 students. Because I wanted all of my students to blog, I set up five free blog sites, one for each of my periods. I made sure beforehand that my school site would allow the students access to the website under their student logins on the school computers.

My plan was to have the students blog once a week. With this plan in mind, I booked the computer lab for all of the Wednesdays in the school year. Some teachers later complained, and on some occasions, I had to graciously relinquish the lab even though I was the one with the foresight to book in advance. After the first blogging day, the students were hooked. They would come in each day asking if we would be blogging, and I had to constantly remind them that we would only blog on Wednesdays. I found their enthusiasm rewarding. My thought was- at least they weren't complaining.

Getting the students signed up and ready to blog took an entire class period. I enabled the feature that allowed students to sign themselves up and allowed them the liberty to choose their usernames. I believed that this freedom to be anonymous in the eyes of their peers would encourage them to write without fear of their peers' judgment. However, this turned out to create more of a hardship for me. Grading their blogs became an absolute pain. I had to match their usernames with their real names in order to assign grades, and this was a tedious chore.

Another problem was that I allowed the students to create their own passwords. People might think that high school students are capable of remembering their usernames and passwords, especially in light of their addictions to MySpace. Yet, I found that my students were quite forgetful. From week to week I was bombarded with student requests for their passwords or usernames. I learned the hard way that allowing students too much liberty was a mistake. After a hundred requests for forgotten passwords, I started to require students to make their passwords their six digit birth dates and their usernames their last names with first initials.

One area that I didn't allow students freedom was in subject matter. I was afraid that they would not know what to write about or that they would write about topics that were inappropriate for the school setting. This was another mistake. Coming up with topics for the students to blog about created more work for me, and it also robbed the students of a chance to really understand what blogging was supposed to be about. Instead of allowing students to blog about topics that they may have been interested in writing about consistently, I chose a different blog topic for them each week. One week, I had the students Google the story about the young boy with cancer who was on the run from the police with his mother. He was trying to get away because he didn't want to receive chemotherapy. The students read the story and then blogged their responses. Most of the blog responses were the same which made grading the blogs a little boring for me. However, the students really enjoyed the topic. Another blog topic the students liked was when I had them research the internet on natural phenomena. They were required to post information about the phenomenon as well as a picture. The students felt that they were able to learn something new in a way that was not boring. At the end of the year, I surveyed the students, and most of them said their favorite thing about the year in English was being able to blog.

Knowing that blogging was a success with the students last year, I began this year with an intent to incorporate blogging in my class instruction this year as well. Only this time, I had a real plan. The first part of the plan was to assign blogging every other week versus every week. This was a good idea for two reasons: it would allow me more time in between blogs to post comments and to grade, and it would allow me more full day class weeks to work on other parts of the English curriculum. One problem the previous year was that it was hard to engage the students in reading stories and novels when the middle of the week was interrupted by blogging.

This time around I also knew how to limit my share of the work. The second week of school, I had the students come up with a bubble map brainstorming topics for their blogs. I had them select one broad topic that they would like to write about, and then they were required to narrow down that topic into nine subtopics. For example, if a student selected music as their broad topic, he/she might narrow that down into specific topics, such as genres of music, famous musicians, or emerging artists, to cover over the next nine blog sessions. Requiring the students to do this activity was a good idea. It made them plan ahead and to really focus their ideas. Another benefit in allowing the students to choose their own topics was that it provided an opportunity for the students to be exposed to a variety of topics. Instead of all of the students blogging about the same subject, each student offered his/her creativity towards creating a diverse selection for readers to view. And, one of the best things about the wide-ranging selection is that grading the blogs is actually fun for me.

There was one change this year that has benefited the student blogging experience that I can not take credit for. 21classes limited its free blog sites to ten users, so I was somewhat forced into purchasing the 21classes package deal that granted me one-hundred user accounts. This new change allowed me to combine my classes into two websites; my first, second and half of my third period share one website, and the other half of my third period shares another website with my other two classes. With more users sharing the websites, there is more variety and a chance for the students to share with readers they may not know. The students also like that they get to see what my other classes are posting. Even though I have to pay twenty dollars a month to maintain the websites, the joy my students have for blogging makes it all worth it.

With the new changes and the new plan, this year of student blogging is off to a great start. The student blogs are impressive and creative. I am really looking forward to seeing the students blossom into proficient writers and a unique new set of bloggers.

The Trials of Life

Last year, on August 25, 2008, at the end of the first day of back-to-school classes, I received a message from my sister-in-law informing me that my father had passed away. Only two and half weeks prior, I had sat with my father in his living room and listened to him inform me of his impending heart surgery. This wasn't the first heart surgery he had, but this one was the one that even his doctors didn't want to see occur. He was 58 years old, diabetic, and the odds were simply not in his favor; in fact, they were stacked against him. For some time before his surgery, he'd suffered from shortness of breath and loss of energy. He could barely walk to the kitchen from his bedroom without feeling winded. His arteries were blocked, and if he didn't have the surgery, it was only a matter of time before he had a stroke or a heart attack.

My father lived in Chicago, and I live in Las Vegas. The day I last saw my father was my on my last day in Chicago during summer break of '08. I stayed longer than usual with my father that day, and we talked about almost everything: Islam, my sisters, my engagement, my future in law school, Sci-fi television. I left my father with a bag of popcorn from Garrett's, and I remember telling him perhaps he shouldn't over indulge- he laughed as though he wasn't going to listen. I hope that he didn't. I hope that he savored every last bite right up until the final buttery kernel at the bottom of the bag. When I left my father's place, I walked myself down the street, down memory lane, and to the bus stop. And, all the while, I knew that this was possibly the last time I would ever walk away from a visit seeing my dad.

When I got the message, it was after school. I had just finished the first day of teaching, and it had gone well. It was my first year teaching freshman, my first day meeting the new students, my first week as a first year student in law school. I had had high hopes for a new beginning, until my world came shattering down. My sister-in-law's voice was low on the recording. She didn't beat around the bush- she just came right out and said it. I needed to get to Chicago quickly. In Islam the bodies of the deceased are to be buried within 3 days. I needed to get a plane ticket. I needed to tell my employers. I needed in inform my law professors. And, I had to call my mom. I knew that she was going to take it hard.

My mother and father never lived together during my lifetime, but they always had a friendship. I never knew when I was young what the exact situation was, and it wasn't until I was older that I got filled in on the story. But, to keep things to the point, I always knew that my mother loved my father, and my father loved my mother. Telling my mother that my father died was like having to her that her best friend was gone. I always seem to be the one who gets stuck passing on the bad news. When my grandmother went into cold blue status, revived, and hung on to the strands of life at the thinnest end of the rope, I had to let my mother know that her mother was on the brink of death. When my older brother was found dead after having fallen over his hotel balcony rail in Saudi Arabia, it was I at the young age of 14 who broke the news to my mother. When my aunt's oncologist clued me in on the fact that my aunt, if lucky, had six months left to live, it was I who carried the message back to my mother. And, so when I made the call to let her know that my father had passed on, I was in familiar territory.

My father's death at the beginning of my first year of law school seem to set the tone for what was to be a new era of trials. Less than a month after my father's death, my four-year engagement with my fiance was called off. Two months later it was back on. The wedding date was set for April. I was married April 4th, and four months later, I called it quits.

I am now in my second year of law school, my fifth year of teaching, and my first year as a divorcee. Last week, I got a letter from the financial aid office informing me that I have reached the federal aid limit, and after next semester, I will no longer be eligible for federal assistance. Again, I felt like my world was coming down. After years of attending school, going through undergrad and obtaining a degree in secondary education, dedicating two years to acquire a masters degree, attending a year in a doctoral program for educational leadership, I have finally found my calling in law school. And, now it seems that my first year in law school, and even my second as I attend it now, might all come to nothing if I can't afford to go on.

I begin this blog as I begin the journey to overcome yet another of the trials of life.