Comments on: Bloglines, I Love You

By: George

George — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 12:55:28 +0000

Getting students to comment in a meaningful way is a big challenge. What I tried last year was creating other projects with students in other states that had blogs, then trying to get students to comment naturally, or willingly. For example, we started an online literary mag called Space.
http://2008space.googlepages.com/ Students from anywhere and everywhere were invited to submit work. By the 3rd issue of Space, many students were commenting on each others work, and the comments were more meaningful because students were connecting around common interests. I also tried assigning students to comment on each other’s blogs, as well as blogs of students outside our classroom. Most of the time, the results were lame. However, not always.

Are you familiar with Paul Allison? He does a weekly webcast called Teachers Teaching Teachers with Susan Ettenheim.
http://teachersteachingteachers.org/ Many of their shows are about this theme, how to go about getting students to connect and comment on each other’s blogs in meaningful ways.

Now I need to check out Bloglines for RSS this year, after reading your post and comment. Last year, I had around 130 blogs, this year I’m only using blogs with two 7th grade classes. By the way, I’m looking for “mentors” for my 7th grade bloggers this year. Looking to pair-up each of my students for the year with a high-school mentor (writing coach) The job would simply be to read and comment once every two weeks.

Hey, thanks for commenting back to me about Bloglines! It’s funny, I didn’t realize I was commenting on a post from 2006 yesterday. I’ve been enjoying going through your blog.

By: Todd

Todd — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 05:25:27 +0000

Yeah, but I haven’t found a way to get students to comment on each other’s blog in any way that doesn’t seem totally artificial. The years I’ve tried it, making a certain number of comments a part of each semester’s grade, the comments have been meaningless, really akin to spam in terms of the lack of value they add to the blog’s content.

So are you tacking 120 blog feeds AND 120 comment feeds? That’s a lot to set up!

If you’re talking about people other than my students commenting on blogs, it happens incredibly rarely and I hear about it from excited students the very next day. The kids themselves are my very own comment RSS feed. Plus, I tell students to turn on comment moderation anyway, so there’s already a wall in between the public and the submitted comment.

The ability to keep an entry as new along with telling me how many total entries exist in a given feed, along with numerous other little things, makes Bloglines my recommendation for managing blogs in a gradebook. Really, Reader just isn’t set up to do what I need to do to keep track of grades, send out reminders, prompt students when work isn’t done, and the like.

By: George

George — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 02:11:00 +0000

Nice description of the moment you saw the coming together of RSS and your student blogs.

The light shone down from heaven while a beautiful chorus rang out a perfectly harmonized “Ahhh!”

For all the talk about how to use blogs in the classroom, you don’t hear much about how efficient blogs can be as a format for classroom writing. I don’t know about other teachers, but I can say from my experience that I am much more familiar with my students’ writing because of RSS. Blogs, coupled with RSS, are the ideal way to structure writing instruction. It’s so efficient being able to read all the student posts from one RSS reader page. I become much more familiar with my students’ writing by using these tools than I would using traditional formats.

I used Google Reader last year, and put each period into individual folders like you described above. I also used RSS for all the comments on each student blog. It’s also important to track their comments.