Can blogging improve students' reading and writing skills?

by Keely Grasser

Apr 23, 2008

BURK’S FALLS — Many youth spend plenty of time browsing and blogging on popular websites like MySpace and Facebook.

But can these popular pastimes help students hone their reading and writing skills?

A group of teachers at Land of Lakes Senior Public School (LOL) want to find out.

Teachers are currently planning a study, which will be implemented in the next school year, looking into whether blogging — short for web-logging, essentially keeping an online diary — can improve students’ writing abilities and raise their reading scores.

LOL was been awarded almost $12,000 in funding to complete the study, through the Ministry of Education’s (MoE) Teacher Leadership and Learning Program (TLLP).

TLLP’s purpose is to let experienced teachers, ones who see themselves in an ongoing role in the classroom, as opposed to striving to become principals or board consultants, design and carry out their own professional development and action research projects, said LOL teacher Anne Shillolo, who’s involved in the blogging study.

She and a group of LOL teachers submitted a lengthy proposal, which was passed at the board level and eventually by the MoE.

Across Ontario, 83 projects were granted funding through TLLP.

The funding received by LOL will go toward equipment and program costs, as well as for teacher education, including attending training sessions, planning out the projects, studying data, reading and professional research, Shillolo said.

Some of the money will go to hiring supply teachers to replace participating teachers while they are busy with the study, she explained.

For now, the teachers will be busy planning the study, which they’ve coined WeBlog2. Planning, Shillolo said, will begin immediately.

“We have all aspects of our project, including our own learning, to plan out this spring,” she said.

This will include meetings, as well as learning about blogging technology in greater detail, she said.

The blogging will be implemented into part of the school’s literacy curriculum beginning next fall.

The teachers will be looking to the reading and writing curriculum to see where blogging could be used.

Right now, Shillolo said they’re taking a good look at a blogging site called Edublog, which provides free blogs to educators and classrooms.

The site, she explained, would give teachers the option to close off the blogs and allow them only to be viewed by the class or to open them up to the web at large.

The blogging site claims it hosts hundreds of thousands of blogs for teachers, researchers, professors, librarians, and of course, students.

Why turn to blogging as a literacy-building tool for students?

Shillolo said that, without having done the study, the most she can speculate is that “the use of new media could be a motivating factor.”

Shillolo said the teachers hope to see a difference in the students’ reading and writing test scores between the project’s beginning and end.

The results of the study will be shared with the education community. That’s part of the TLLP’s mandate.

Shillolo said the teachers are expected to note what they’ve learned that’s new and different. This will include a “significant data collection process,” she explained, that will help quantify the results of the study.

The data they collect may be mined through standardized testing like literacy tests or through surveys or focus groups.

Participants in the TLLP are required to share their study findings in several ways, Shillolo said.

This could include writing an article for a professional journal, giving a presentation on their study during a professional development day or going to other schools to speak about it, she explained.

This isn’t the first study LOL has participated in during recent years.

Teachers are currently compiling their findings from a study into whether having the right materials and longer blocks of silent writing time could narrow the gap between boys’ and girls’ achievement rates.

They’ve also received grants to set up and run an after school tutorial program.
“I think that it is a very special place to work to have a small staff involved in so many original projects…It’s an excellent group,” Shillolo said. “I’m very excited to be working here as part of this community of educators.”