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Video Report - Rogersville students hone writing, computer skills with blogs

Published April 29th, 2008 | 0 Comments

Rogersville City School science and computer teacher Jennifer Ewing instructs fifth-grader Alex Holcomb, whose class is using blog technology for both computer lessons and writing practice. Jeff Bobo photo.

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ROGERSVILLE — Experience is often the best teacher when it comes to writing skills, which is one reason why some Rogersville City School fifth-graders have been deposited in the Internet blogosphere for this school year.

One of the subjects that the state of Tennessee wants emphasized in fifth grade is narrative writing, but computer training is also heavily stressed for that age group.

RCS fifth-grade teacher Jennifer Ewing came up with a way of killing two birds with one stone by incorporating blogging into both writing and computer instruction.

Blog is an abridgment of the term “web log” and is a Web site maintained by a person making regular entries of commentary with opportunities for readers to respond.

Every student in Ewing’s class maintains their own blog, makes regular entries, and replies to responses.

“It really motivated them because they have an audience and not just the teachers are reading what they wrote, but anybody can read it,” Ewing told the Times-News Tuesday. “It gave us a good opportunity to work on proofreading and helped them see a need to write clearly because they had an audience.”

Anyone can read and reply to the blogs written by Ewing’s students by logging onto the school Web site at www.rcschool.net and clicking Ewing’s class link, or by going directly to Ewing’s class Web page at ewingj.21classes.com.

Every student in Ewing’s homeroom has their own blog. Aside from polishing their writing skills the blog program teaches students computer skills like making hyperlinks to their stories, researching the Internet and using sources that are valid.

This has been a yearlong program, and Ewing said what’s been interesting for her is going back to her students’ first blogs and comparing them to what they’re writing today.

“You get to see their development over the year, and you can go back and look at what they’ve done because everything is still posted,” Ewing said. “I credit a lot of their advancement to the fact that they’re writing every day, and they’re having fun at it, and it’s just really good practice. We had some pretty strong writers already, and they’ve gotten better, but the students who were a little less advanced have just improved by leaps and bounds.”

Blog topics vary from student to student.

Fifth-grader Michael Jones said Tuesday most people in his circle of blog contacts were talking about the upcoming summer vacation and what they plan to do.

Lisa Murrell has been writing about redecorating her bedroom so that she can invite friends over to watch movies.

Hannah Montgomery has been writing about an inconsiderate older sister. She said she’s found that many of her blog contacts have similar problems with older siblings.

Ewing said that student Alex Holcomb’s blogs receive the most “hits” of anyone in the class. Ewing said Alex is quiet and well-behaved in class, but his personality seems to shine when he communicates in his blog.

Alex’s blog Tuesday was titled “Scared” and discussed his fear of being interviewed on video by the newspaper reporter who’d invaded his classroom. Unfortunately for Alex, his fear came true.

“I just write about everything,” Alex said. “Whatever is going on in my life.”

Ewing’s class is partnering in this blog experiment with another class from Hawkins Elementary School, and students from both classes have been partnered to write on similar topics and respond to each other’s blogs. They only know each other by “user names,” but near the end of the school year both classes will get together for a field trip at Rogersville City School, where they can meet each other in person for the first time.

Identifying themselves by user name as opposed to their actual name was one of the lessons from Ewing’s Internet safety segment of the program. They also learn not to reveal any personal information about themselves.

The school already has Internet filters for inappropriate materials. In addition to that, any information that goes out or comes in to Ewing’s classroom blogs is monitored by Ewing.

“I can set it just so only we can look at it, but what I was wanting to do was for them to write for a larger audience, so I set it so that anyone in the public can look at it,” Ewing said. “Of course, that requires me to monitor what’s going out and what’s going in.”

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