6th Grade Blog Club — A Few First Glimmers of Hope

January 23, 2008 | Tagged edtechtalk, edublogs, konradglogowski, womenoftheweb |

As I wrote in “I May Be Nuts, But…” a few months ago, I am now the advisor of a 1x/week blog club for 6th Graders. Although the first meeting attracted boys only, by the end of November we had 7 girls in the club as well. The kids were completely pumped about the opportunity to create a space on the web of their own, their Division Head was appropriately concerned about sufficient guidelines and parameters, and I felt as though a loose structure with light supervision seemed like the best way to begin since it was a student-generated club. Their initial posts have run the typical gamut of 6th grade interests, ranging from “What’s Hot, What’s Not?” to music and movie reviews to an advice column. Not the kind of “thinking outside the box” type of student writing I had originally hoped for, although they were definitely having fun.

In early January, I used my commute time to listen to a podcast of Ed Tech Talk’s Women of the Web show featuring Konrad Glogowski. I was completely inspired by his story of how he set up individual blogs for his Canadian 8th Graders and gave them four glorious weeks to blog and write without any guidelines or instructions, only to write about what they were passionate about. (click here for that show’s podcast and show’s chat notes.) Newly inspired to challenge my own 6th Graders, I gave a little speech at the beginning of our most recent Blog Club meeting and challenged them to write about their passions, interests, things they weren’t writing about for school assignments. I followed up with a few examples, none of which anyone took me up on, but they got the general idea.

Toward the end of the Club, one of the quieter students asked me how to create links to individual songs in iTunes. I noticed that the two songs he was linking to were by Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin, two of my own personal favorites. I asked him about his interest in classic rock and he instantly lit up and went into an animated rant about how none of his friends understand that this is the music that started it all, that has the best musicians and that everyone his age should be listening to. I looked at him and said “That’s what you should be blogging about.” He responded by saying “I can write that kind of stuff?!” YES! He lamented the fact that our club meetings are so short and I reminded him that he can write posts onto our blog from anywhere with an internet connection, including home. He immediately began typing away, and by the end he exclaimed “This club is so much FUN!” Woo hoo! (Disclaimer: he hasn’t finished his post yet. I’ll link to it as soon as he’s done.) The Blog Club’s blog lives here.

(Jimi Hendrix photo courtesy of http://flickr.com/photos/toofarnorth/134541124/)