So… how do you get students engaged in an authentic reflection experience?  How do you know that they are learning in the classroom?  How can you find out what they are truly engaged in?

The answer to all these questions is blogging.  I asked my World Religions students to complete a weekly blog post on their personal blog (hosted on my domain – learningsmart.org).  The only instructions I gave them was that it needed to be at least a paragraph in length and that it should be their “Oooh, Aaah” moment of the week.  They had to respond to something from class (related to World Religions) that made them think, or irritated them, or surprised them.  The responses have been stunning (check them out by following the links on the blogroll blogs.learningsmart.org)!

Admittedly some students have not been engaging with the activity… some have had to be chased to post, others have produced limited posts like:

My ooooh moment for this week is when Mr. Smart said that we would be switching seats already this early in the year. He said we would switch about once every 3 weeks, which is suprising because that means we have new disscusion groups often. This just suprised me.

But even a post like this has its value.  I have been able to post comments online to this student, and follow up in the classroom… was this the most significant moment for you this week in class?  What are you learning?  Without this activity it would be much harder to get a feeling for the level of engagement in the classroom.

Other posts have helped me to see when students are struggling with a topic.  After a week including a lesson on Plato’s Cave this topic dominated blog posts including many references to being “confused” or “blown away” and many comments about questionning the nature of reality.  This gave me a great opportunity to follow up the following week.

I have  been tracking the topics that students have chosen to write about and can see that students are most engaged in the ethics portion of the week, but that the specific religions topics are still engaging students.  This has been impacting my planning and helping me to balance my instruction.

The best part of using the blogs has been that I have been able to make connections with all my students and hear more about their responses to the material we are studying.  The reality is that when you teach large classes you don’t have time to make personal contact with all students.  The blogs have allowed me to see that many of my “quiet students” are some of the most engaged.  The blogs have given some students a forum that is well-suited to them.  Infact some students have become prolific bloggers posting more than once a week.

One element which still needs development is commenting.  There is nothing more exciting than seeing a blog which has inspired a conversation… an easy thing to find at many edublogs.  Some of my students (with a little encouragement) have begun to comment on the posts of their peers, but not many.  I have been trying to comment on every post that every student makes (hopefully modelling good practice!), but I have still not seen much student engagement… any ideas?

So why did I wait for this?

One of my most important values as a teacher is that I wont ask my students to participate in any activity that either I don’t understand, or that I have not completed myself.  This was the primary reason why it has taken me years to bring myself to ask my students to blog.  

Over the last two years I have been following the blogging careers of Doug Belshaw (dougbelshaw.com), Karl Fisch (http://thefischbowl.blogspot.com/), and Jeff Utecht (http://www.thethinkingstick.com/), amongst others.  This summer I launched my own blog (see around you!) and have been exploring the challenges of commenting on the educational world around me.  Blogs should be personal, interesting, interactive, purposeful and public.  These were the values that I wanted to instill in the blogs produced by my students.  These are the values I have seen in the best edublogs I have read.

For student blogs however there needs to be an increased element of security and protection  for the students.  This was the reason I chose to host the blogs on my server (@http://bluehost.com) to avoid inappropriate ads and to control the content being published on the domain.  I knew that Doug Belshaw had used Word Press MU, that it had good admin controls and was fully customizable.  In addition I feel that I am now proficient at using a feedreader, and I can use this to track activity on all of the student blogs (thanks to google reader and the rss functions of Word Press blogs!).

So what are you waiting for?

There are many easy ways to get students blogging, but I would definately recommend beginning yourself.  Subscribe to some edublogs (like those mentionned above) using google reader or e-mail, start writing yourself (the easiest way is to sign up for a blog at edublogs.org), and then get your students involved.  Word Press MU is pretty easy to use, but so is edublogs.org for students.  Let me know how your journey turns out 8-).

Genghis Khan has been written about by contemporaries and historians, but he has become more than that.  He appears regularly in popular culture.  In Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure he is taking from his time to ravage a mall.  In 1979 the German band Dschinghis Khan produced the theme song of my AP class this year… apparently some of them even listened to it in their cars :-D

This made the release of the Russian movie Mongol a little more interesting to me.  I don’t think that I have been quite as excited about a movie for a while.  My wife and I went to see it at the AFI theater in Sliver Spring, MD last week.  While I was disappointed in some of the edits, and the rambling nature of the plot, I was captivated by the scenery, the depiction of nomadic life and, of course, the story of Temudgin himself.