Writing Made Fun

In Shelbie Witte’s article, “that’s online writing not boring school writing”: Writing with blogs and the talkback project, she talked about how online writing is something that can help increase students desire to write. While in a parent teacher conference with a student who had no aspiration to write in the classroom, she found that the student was actively involved in writing online each evening. The student responded by saying that online writing was fun and classroom writing was boring.


The teacher started a project called the talkback project where she found that students were much more engaged. I think that the project this teacher created was a good idea and presented many benefits for the classroom. For example one teacher who implemented blogs into the classroom found that students were, “hungry for writing on their classroom blog”. Something that is rarely found in typical pencil paper responses. Also students today come from a digital way of life and will need little to no instruction or education on how to use digital tools such as blogs. Also, this gives students the opportunity to look for information and ideas from people outside the classroom since the internet extend to people all over the world.

As with all new assignments the teacher also ran into some problems during the talkback project. Since students use the internet for their own social purposes the blog somewhat turned into a place where students were posting things that were not related to class discussion. For this reason I think that when using this tool teachers need to make the instructions extra clear with rules about sticking to the assigned topics. The resources available in the classroom can also be a problem teachers can run into. Since not every school is blessed with a classroom set of computers, making arrangements so that each student has time to blog can become a problem. Also, if blogging is done from the home the issue of students having computers at home can become a problem.

After a while the teacher decided to refrain from the talkback project and go back to the old way of journaling in the classroom. She found that students were upset with this decision referring to the decision as “using leeches instead of nuclear medicine. Another student stated that “By taking away our access to the talkback project blog you have taken away my voice”. Since it was such a disappointment for the talkback project to be taken away from students, this is evidence that students are more engaged when using the blog. With my experience as a student I find that when I have an assignment I am excited to work on I put in more of an effort and more of an effort leads to more engagement in the materal. Overall these types of experiments can lead the classroom to a place where more learning occurs.