What Did I Learn from the Interactive Journal Process?

I think we were discussing earlier the misconceptions most of us (especially me) had with the concept of blogging. For some time, blogging seemed to me the biggest waste of time, even more of a waste of time than watching The Office, if you can believe that. However, forced exposure to the world of blogging has changed my mindset.

I used to do interactive notebooks with my students...these were notebooks that the kids wrote in on a variety of topics, both in and out of class. The notebooks would never leave the room and when I had time, I would comment in them, hence the interactive part. However, this interaction only functioned two ways: from me to them and back again. With blogging, the communication becomes three dimensional and allows for students to comment on each other's blogs and in that manner, new learning and understanding can flourish in that capacity. What I resisted for years was the idea that blogging could be conducive to learning; how that was possible was beyond me. I thought that bloggers were people with nothing better to do, had an intense desire to let everyone know what they were doing at every particular moment of the day ("Hey, I'm off to do laundry" or "Oops, the pasta boiled over"), or simply were addicted to the concept of being networked.

This is not the case anymore. Our world is moving so fast, and as Kathy said, I cannot imagine my future classroom without this tool. Journals that I collect on a weekly basis can now be done online. Journaling is such a go-to activity for an English teacher that the concept of blogging has to be seen as the ultimate in journal accessibility. In fact, I'm writing this while staring at a mountain of papers that need to be filed and handed back and placed in portfolios...if I had been doing blogs all along...

This has changed for me. Now I can see the educational value in it, and believe it or not, I actually enjoy the writing. It feels good to get some of this stuff off my chest and to have some people view it and actually respond to it. Will I continue with this? The verdict's not in yet on that, but it will become part of my classroom toolbox and in fact, has already done so.