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Teachers finding their voice on blogs

More educators are using the online publishing forum to vent, or to instruct kids.

WEST PALM BEACH - It's a digital teachers lounge, missing only the coffee-stained sofas.

It's what a teacher mentions when she wants students to look up from their iPod playlists and take an interest in class.

It's the blog - an online publishing forum. An intrepid group of educators in Florida and nationwide are starting to use it to kvetch about their day or as a teaching tool.

Boynton Beach High science teacher Jamey Young uses his blog for the former, alternately enthusing online about good days and grumbling about bureaucracy or FCAT requirements on others.

He started the blog last year, "to rant about the craziness in teaching," he said. "It allows me to vent and tell funny stories. It's a cheaper form of psychiatry."

A phone call from a pleased parent on Feb. 9 prompted him to write, "it really made me feel better about being a teacher; that I do make a difference."

It was a better day than the one whose post began simply, "Sometimes I hate my job."

Self-reflection is a hallmark of many teachers' blogs, according to the creator of weblogg-ed.com - the first stop for most teachers who want to try blogging. But thinking of them only as online journals shortchanges the medium, said Will Richardson, the nationally known lecturer on the topic who runs the site.

"More and more teachers now are finally starting to wrap their brains around the idea that you can do some really interesting things," with them, Richardson said. He estimates there are about 3,000 teachers like Young. When he began four years ago, the number of blogging teachers could have fit into one car.

"There were three of us," Richardson said dryly.

Today's 3,000 is still a tiny fraction of the total number of teachers in the country, but Richardson predicts the role of blogs in schools is likely to grow.

"I don't think there's any way that these tools are going away," Richardson said. "Schools are going to have to figure out how to make it work for them. The expectation is going to be when kids go to college that they need to be able to work collaboratively and do it online."

A few hours earlier he had moderated a panel on the topic at the annual National Education Computing Conference in Philadelphia. The conference is a necessary stop on many technophile teachers' summer itineraries, and this year an estimated 12,500 of them attended.

For the first time, there were at least 15 different sessions devoted to or directly referencing blogging in the classroom. Richardson, a supervisor of Instructional Technology at a high school in Flemington, N.J., recently landed a book deal on the topic.

Word of mouth can be powerful as pioneering teachers talk about the benefits to co-workers.

That's why more than 300 of 7,000 teachers in McComb County, Mich., are already registered bloggers on a site called visitmyclass.com. Blog names range from the eloquent, "A Literary Escape," to the pointed, "Ms. Klosowski's Helpful Suggestions for GED Improvement."

Chris Burnett, a self-described technophobic language arts teacher in Macomb County, used a blog for the first time this past year to engage her students.

Rather than hang their writing around the room, she's publishing the musings of one of her eighth-grade classes on her blog. Readers can share their thoughts in postings on the blog.

"The kids got feedback from England, from the United States, from Bermuda," Burnett said. "That's what got them hooked. They wanted to keep writing better in hopes that they would get positive feedback."

She figured out an effective system for thwarting the primary concern that keeps most teachers from blogging about their classes: protecting students from predators. None of Burnett's students' names appear.

Instead they use identification numbers. All feedback comes to her e-mail first and she determines if it is appropriate for posting.

Fear of the outside world having a window into students' lives is nagging at the Palm Beach County school district, according to technology programs specialist Kim Cavanaugh.

"We're certainly not encouraging it, and we're certainly not discouraging it," Cavanaugh said of students using teachers' blogs, crystallizing the quandary that many observers of the blogging trend said educators now find themselves in. "There are so many security and privacy issues."

[Last modified July 9, 2005, 23:34:17]