Blogging on Teachers' TV

By sheer serendipity I happened to see a programme on teacher's tv about blogging this afternoon. And very interesting it was too. The school they visited was a Primary in East Sussex which also had an autistic centre. All the pupils used blogs and clearly found them both stimulating and fun. Boys who were not keen on writing really wanted to work on the computer to create entries that could be read not just by their classmates but the whole world. There was a boy had come over from Iraq whose self confidence had been greatly improved by the whole experience of blogging: members of his family still in Iraq could see his work and telephone him to say how good it was. How different from just having work displayed on the classroom wall!

Another boy, from Bangladesh, had very little English when he can into the school and found writing his blog difficult at first: but now it is easy and his English is excellent. I know this cannot all be put down to blogging but the thought of the global audience which included his family still in Bangladesh was a great motivator. As were the calls from them saying how well he was doing.

This breaking down of the classroom wall is one of the most powerful motivators there is. Alan November talks of some pupils writing for a fan-fiction site where, like the pupils in this Primary, the motivation comes from knowing that others are reading your work, appreciating it, commenting on it, and maybe also being inspired by it. As he said: "If you had the choice of writing for your class homework or an audience of millions what would you do?"

The autism centre was just as interesting: the computer given them a distance that they don't have when talking face to face. Also the non-judgemental interaction is confidence building. I saw something similar when doing some work on video conferencing. A special school was using it with its pupils to talk to pupils in another school. Some pupils had found any sort of conversation with a teacher difficult but when using the VC equipment they came into their own and found their voice. Perhaps blogging can have a similar effect: when blogging is also taken to include podcasts, video-blogging and a global audience then perhaps we have a powerful tool at our disposal.

As well as the full programme two shorter clips from it are also on the teachers tv site: one about blogging in the autistic unit and another about the benefits of blogging in the more general context. It is well worth watching.