I am presenting at the Tots and Technology conference in Galveston on Monday and Tuesday. My topic is quadblogging and digital diaries to raise the quality of writing in the classroom. This is a topic that I am passionate about. Teaching writing is my love, and I enjoy seeing kids engaged in their writing in a meaningful way. One of the problems that I have seen with how we traditionally publish student's writing is that they are not really writing for an authentic audience. Publishing to the outside-your-door-bulletin-board is not very exciting for a writer. Publishing digitally and allowing children and other teachers from all over the world to read and comment on their writing is both exciting and fun!
I got involved with quadblogging in January of last year. David Mitchell from England is the founder of quadblogging. When I stumbled upon it last year I knew it was something I wanted to try, so I signed us up. We were given a quadblog coordinator, Laura Gee, also from England. We blogged with two schools in England and one in France. My kids were excited to come in each day and visit the focus school for that week and get straight to working on their own writing and commenting on writing. I gave lessons on netiquette and what makes a comment "thoughtful". We worked on editing and peer editing during our blog time so that our comments would represent the best that 3rd grade could show.
The unexpected side effects of quadblogging and digitally publishing our writing was that my students wanted to write more and I found it was easy to incorporate other learning objectives along the way. When we were learning about elapsed time our sidebar time widgets for England and France became the perfect vehicle for authentic teaching. My students wanted to know where their friends in England were and what they were doing at various times during our day. Teaching geography was a snap because of our flag counter. The kids would see where visitors were coming from and then run to the large world map to determine how far away they were. Mini-lessons on writing felt more purposeful in that my students were actually invested in their audience and motivated to improve their skills to make their stories more interested for their audience.
My outside the door bulletin board was empty most of the school year, but I didn't care- It was evident on the web that my kids were true writers.
