Stephen Anderson tweeted out a link to this post: Making Paper Blogs to Prepare for the Online Experience. While the post makes a good case for it, and it makes a lot of sense if your students have limited online opportunity my reaction was not positive. My thoughts are not based on the content of the article, they were formed before I read it.
My first thought was that if we teach students that their early drafts are not worthy of being seen by others, it implies the early part of the writing process is bad. If we teach writing as a process and that their first drafts should not always be their last, we also need to teach that there should be no shame in sharing their writing at any time during the process.
If we are going to use blogging as a platform for student writing, shouldn't we make it repository of the process of writing as well? Students believe you only write something once because that is all they see. Perhaps if we have students model their writing process publicly we could dispel that misrepresentation of writing.
I reacted to the post title this way because I have been struggling with how I want to approach writing in my own class. I have decided that I want to impress upon my students the value of all of their work. We will be collecting all of their writing throughout the year in composition books. My goal is to have several filled by the end of the school year. My hope is that my students learn that they should value all of their writing, that a first draft is not necessarily the last, and that by archiving the work they will be able to see the improvement in their writing over the year.
My first thought was that if we teach students that their early drafts are not worthy of being seen by others, it implies the early part of the writing process is bad. If we teach writing as a process and that their first drafts should not always be their last, we also need to teach that there should be no shame in sharing their writing at any time during the process.
If we are going to use blogging as a platform for student writing, shouldn't we make it repository of the process of writing as well? Students believe you only write something once because that is all they see. Perhaps if we have students model their writing process publicly we could dispel that misrepresentation of writing.
I reacted to the post title this way because I have been struggling with how I want to approach writing in my own class. I have decided that I want to impress upon my students the value of all of their work. We will be collecting all of their writing throughout the year in composition books. My goal is to have several filled by the end of the school year. My hope is that my students learn that they should value all of their writing, that a first draft is not necessarily the last, and that by archiving the work they will be able to see the improvement in their writing over the year.
