Blogs revisited

I have wondered for quite some time how to transfer the enthusiasm my students share with Facebook to a real book. Now I realize it is not a transplant that is required , but a life line. I have observed my adolescent students speaking excitedly about face-booking, and how many friends they have on Facebook. When I questioned them about their frequency of use of Face book, their collective daily average was forty-five minutes. Homework is rarely done by many of these students, and in fact, many of them are alliterate, yet they spend extended periods of their leisure time engaged in the same activities I struggle to get them to do in the classroom. My introduction to Blogs is the life line I have been seeking. Engaging struggling and alliterate readers can be done through the use of blogs. Blogs are easy to use, they have the potential to promote literacy and dialog.

Blogs give students the same sense of community they enjoy on Facebook, this is especially important for struggling readers. Gunning (2006) agrees that "low achieving readers also need a sense of community. By being accepted and valued in the classroom and in reading and writing groups, low-achieving readers are motivated to try harder."(p. 19) Blogs can aid in all aspects of literacy development, it can also facilitate social collaboration. Students who never had a 'voice' in the class, can freely communicate with teachers and peers by blogging. Students are afforded the opportunity to be creative when blogging, while they engage in the process of reading and writing. I am particularly interested in using blogs to engage my male literature students in actually reading their literature texts. I hope to engage them in discussion of the text, and have them find ways to analyze thematic, character, structural and 'book to self issues'. Since social networking is already a part of the lives of our student, then as educators we need to use all tools available to us to help students acquire the literacy skills the need to succeed in and out of school. My investigations have taken me into literature teaching strategies using a computer virtual world with 3-dimensional characters to bring literature text alive.

As a new inductee into digital collaboration and social interaction as teaching and learning tools, I am concerned by the assumptions we make as educators. We all assume our students, our schools, our curricula and our policy makers have caught up with the need to integrate technology in educational pedagogy. It would seem with all I have been exposed to recently, there is a need to make some drastic changes in our educational system, or else we will eternally be playing catch-up. Many of our schools are without Internet access, we have antiquated equipment and too few computers.