Inquiry Blogs: The Real Question

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.

Hang on a second.

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.

this is a digital notepad. it's a metaphor.