One thing that I’ve given serious thought to because I saw
the movie Freedom Writers ages ago and I have a Hollywood image of how
powerful it could end up being to build an ideal classroom environment is, of
course, keeping a daily write journal. Another thing that makes me want to
explore journals in the classroom is that I’ve recently been tricked into
picking up journaling by someone who gets paid to talk. An article from Julia
Cameron’s The Artist’s Way about something called morning pages was
thrusts onto me, and after reading it I figured I’d give it a go, because why
not. I don’t follow all the directions, but essentially, you’re meant to write
3 pages by hand first thing when you wake up to get the creative juices flowing
and the cobwebs cleared out for the day. I don’t write it longhand because,
well, it’s 2019. But otherwise, I find it really helpful when I engage with it
at doing just what I was told it would do, and it’s definitely shaped how I
write a considerable amount in a far less considerable amount of time.
Like the example blog that seems to be addressing journaling
that was linked on a resource page, I too have too many things in the running
for my attention in this blog. There are so many things that I want to know more
about that I mean to try to incorporate into my classroom, so deciding on what
I plan to do for this blog has been a tough one.
Of course, I have to consider my field work and what
experience I have with high school aged children in my life, and that makes me
want to explore using multimodality more often and offering it as a choice that
can be made on any project. But, I took an entire course on that not too long
ago, so I’m not sure I would be willing to devote more blogging to it right now
(even though in honesty, it’s probably the single most helpful thing that I can
imagine to get more students to engage with course work). There’s a lot of
potential with multimodality. It allows for a lot of choice for students and it
engages them with technology, which are both likely to get you that precious
student buy-in that I keep hearing about.
Not to slam on the brakes of your internal reading voice,
but I believe my writing what you’ve just read has led me to a painfully
obvious resolution to my now silly dilemma. Blogs are multimodal journals. For
my inquiry blog I’ll be exploring the use of blogs in the classroom.
For anyone that knows me or has read anything I’ve written, I’m sure you’re
shocked at the slight meta level that blogging for a classroom about blogging
for a classroom has about it, but it does honestly remove the need to choose between
the two.
What I already know about blogging is expressed below this
in previous blog posts and above this very sentence as I described (as vaguely
as possible) what I know about journaling and multimodal composition. A few
things that I’d like to know going forward is how to effectively set up a blogging
platform that might be able to stay in a closed loop for my classrooms (so it can
provide the level of privacy that the classroom walls do), how to ensure that
students that may have less access to technology have a chance to participate
with the blogs, and probably a ton more that I haven’t even considered yet. I'm not sure right now what resources I'll be using to further research this outside of the book I mentioned earlier, the internet, and perhaps even an instructor that has integrated blogging into their classrooms well. This is about twice as long as this has to be (I mean, if it had to be
any length, but, as you may recall, this is certainly not required) so I’m done,
for now. Thanks for your time.
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| this is a digital notepad. it's a metaphor. |
