Coming of Age: An introduction to the new worldwide web

By Mechelle De Craene

Introduction: blogs in the classroom
According to the Perseus Developmental Corporation, 52% of all blogs are created and maintained by 13 to 19-year-olds (Twist, 2004). Yet many teachers in the U.S. still do not use blogs as a learning tool in their classrooms. Additionally, when researching the few pedagogical blogs out there, I found that, of the blogs used in classroom settings, most were geared toward gifted students.

Blogs and special needs students
Thus, I pondered how blogs could be used by students with special needs. What I found was that blogging can be a tool that promotes autonomy in the classroom empowering students to take ownership of their own learning process. Additionally, the medium of blogs also allows students to share their knowledge in a publishable format which in turn may teach their online audience. Now more than ever, the audience can influence and inspire young authors, thereby scaffolding students’ writing abilities as their skills evolve. Hence, blogging can be very Vygotskian, so to speak.

Surprisingly, within our Information Age, pedagogical blogging was new to my school. Many of my peers had never heard of blogs before and much of the research on blogs comes from the U.K. When I explained to my fellow teachers, some expressed concerns about potential legal issues.

I still wanted to explore the use of blogs in the classroom, and selected a small group of 8th grade students (i.e. age 14). To start with, the girls and I had a “refresher” discussion on internet safety. Each of the girls picked a pen name for confidentiality.

Acceptable Use Policies
Acceptable Use Policies (i.e. internet permission slips) were signed by the girls’ parents at the beginning of the year. “Acceptable Use Policies (AUPs) typically establish expectations for how students and faculty will use school resources, procedures they are expected to follow and consequences when expectations and procedures are violated”(Grabe & Grabe, 2001).

Currently there are no official laws, rules, or guidelines for blogging in U.S. classrooms. Therefore, we came up with some classroom guidelines. “Preparing students to be responsible users of the internet also involves helping them learn what is safe and appropriate behaviour” (Grabe & Grabe, 2001). Each school year, I ask my students for input on the classroom rules and wanted us to share in cultivating the cyber climate as well.

Our rules included safety guidelines such as not to reveal students’ and/or teachers’ names, addresses, phone numbers, or the name of our school. Hence, we all had varied and somewhat creative pen names. Interestingly, when I asked the girls for suggestions regarding the classroom blog guidelines, I noticed a pattern among their comments. I placed these comments into the following main categories: (1) confidentiality (2) authenticity (3) respect, and (4) teamwork. Much of the discourse pertaining to blog rules took place online between the students.

The purpose of our blog
The purpose of our blog was to serve as an experimental digital platform for class discussion. Since all the participants were considered “at-risk”, addressing the social-emotional needs of my students was a part of their curriculum. We decided to use the blog to discuss various topics that concerned them. In a sense, our classroom blog served as a virtual peer support group.

I asked the girls which topics they would like to discuss on the blog and the following were their suggestions: (1) music (2) hobbies (3) self-esteem (4) parents (5) boyfriends (6) sex (7) drugs, and (8) education. The girls then voted on which topic they wanted to discuss. The topic of self-esteem was chosen. Many of the girls said they chose self-esteem because they believed that the other topics were all interconnected with self-esteem.

Prior to discussing self-esteem online we read a chapter titled Self-Image and Self-Improvement in th