Blog Use in K-12 Scottish Foreign Language Courses

The group journal blog grew out of the popular practice of having students keep pen-and-paper journals to reflect on their learning. The conscious-raising effect of having students reflect on the learning goals and evaluate their own progress towards meeting those goals been described by Aileen Ward (2005). In the initial iteration of this project, before the implementation of the web-based writing, students in their first year of language learning were encouraged to write a paper journal to record what they had learned to do in each set of lessons. However, the teachers leading this project reported that the task was quickly met with frustration by students who felt that the journal’s audience, the teacher, already knew where their problems lay. Teachers also reported that it was difficult to find time to allow pupils to exchange journals, a process that may have allowed them to see shared areas of difficulty and to help each other problem-solve. Another challenge for students included identifying a subject for their journal entries; while some students requested assistance from the teacher in determining a good topic for their journal entries, other students were nervous about expressing their difficulties and believed they may have been the only ones with their particular problems.

In a bid to resolve these issues a group blog was begun, that is, one weblog with separate authorship rights for each student. Students could post their reflections at their convenience, when they felt they had something to say rather than for an assignment deadline. Students were able to write in the group blog and at the same time still kept their paper journals. Students could post and read each other’s posts on the weblog from home, from the school library or the one classroom computer if they finished their work early. This flexibility meant that computer access both at home and in school was less of an issue than if the task of writing the learning blog was given as homework or as an in-class activity. Peers and teachers, including teachers from other classes, could leave comments and suggestions for improvement, advice and help or they might just say “well done.” For the period that this experiment was able to run there were no comments that needed to be moderated or edited and teachers reported that many students maintained their paper logs more consistently at the same time. Old and new existed in tandem at the wish of the students.

Since the completion of the first iteration of the group blog project, other Scottish educators have further developed the idea of using group blogs as a means to guide students to reflect critically on their own learning. These teachers have begun posting audio and visual work of students, including student PowerPoints, and they have made a more explicit effort to coach students on how to comment constructively. One such example in developing students’ skills in constructive criticism is from The Gordon Schools, Huntly, Aberdeenshire,2 where a “two stars and a wish”3 approach has allowed students to both congratulate and point out areas for improvement in a constructive manner. The attitudes and expectations are not only visible on the website itself but have also been revisited on a regular basis in the face-to-face classroom. Thus, the writing and communication that is taking place online has had a noticeable effect on students’ in-class performance. As a side-effect of this peer review, students are exposed to many other performances or writings and when they make comments, they adopt the role of teacher. In doing so, they read critically and when they identify an area for improvement are required to explain the very idea or point that they have themselves just been learning. This practice of explaining to one’s peers serves to reinforce the lesson and encourages the student to engage in the subject manner in an active manner.

Students who participated in the Group Journal Blog responded positively about the experience and requested to use blogs for other purposes. Some students indicated that they wished to have a blog to publish their best work and/or final drafts of written work. Therefore, one blog was set up for an entire S2 (students aged 13 to 14 years) class where pupils were asked to post their best work from the week. Writing on the blog took place after class on the classroom computer or from students’ home computers. As a result, this use of the blog did not require any additional classroom time or preparation time by the teacher. The teacher of this class reported that pupils worked harder knowing that their work would be truly public. The blog was open not only to classmates and schoolmates, but was open to the entire world – including, perhaps even more importantly, the students’ parents. A second best work blog project was developed for a class of S3 (students aged 15 years). Students in this second group tended to be somewhat weaker in their language skills. They were required to create material that the teacher would post to the blog during the last five minutes of the class period. The blog was only open to the teacher, students in the class, and senior school management who were encouraged by the teacher to browse the blog and leave positive comments for the students.

Teachers reported that students who posted best work to the blogs appreciated having a wider audience than they normally would have had for traditional writing assignments. Students were able to ascertain the size of their new audience by referring to the blogs’ comments and by checking the tracking statistics of the blogging software that indicates number of users who access a blog. For the blog that was open to the world, students became keenly interested in the geographical location of their readers and this interest led to the development of another project. In one primary school in the West of Scotland, the geographical statistical data was used as a launching pad for additional cultural learning activities. Students at the school chose one region or country from which a reader had come and developed an offline poster display about that region or country. The posters, in turn, were written about and photos of the displays were incorporated on the class blog site.4

As the name implies, a school trip blog is written by students who are traveling on a school program. Traditionally, pupils on school trips have been required to write a daily diary with pen and paper and often report that the assignment seems burdensome at the time of the trip. While students usually report that they are happy to have a reminder of their trip after the event when they graduate and leave the institution, during the trip itself students have complained that writing recaps of the day’s experiences does not give them a context for developing their cultural awareness. The students’ comments seem to indicate that the solitary act of keeping a journal about their trip does not give them contextual support for understanding the new experiences met during their travels and suggests the students seek some kind of community or group support as they undergo the learning experience. With the support of the MFLE, two teachers developed school trip blogs. One blog was for a History and Language Trip to Auschwitz, Poland and the second blog was for a French Trip to France.

The school trip blogs were used pre-trip, during the trip, and post-trip as a way to share information and explore ideas about the travel learning experience. Before the trip, the blog was written by the teacher alone and included information to help students prepare for the trip. The teacher posted hyperlinks to sites relevant to the trip and to planning the trip and photos and student comments about previous trips. During the trip, students wrote their reflections about the trip, published photographs to accompany the written text, and even used audio recording to publish their spoken reaction to the trip. The blog therefore allowed students to publish written text, pictures, and spoken word reflections on their experiences.

Teachers reported that the blog daily diary was far more popular than the pen-and-paper version for three reasons. The first reason is that students were aware of the audience reading their work back home and around the world. This awareness came in the form of comments left under each post, which would be read on the trip coach or viewed by students while preparing new diary entries. In addition, teachers explained that students started to expect feedback on their writing and therefore felt obliged to write as regularly as possible and use vocabulary in their native language which was far richer than would have been used in a paper diary with a low or no audience. A final reason the online trip journal was favored includes the ability to use multimedia (text, photo, audio) that seemed to provide extra inspiration to get the students started on each post. Unlike the online journal, the pen-and-paper journal is static and does not incorporate the richness of the multimedia online journal. Teachers reported that the digital forum seemed to inspire students to engage in descriptive and personal writing that was much more vivid and fully developed than the traditional journal did. As with the Best Work Blog, the geographic location of visitors to the School Trip Blog provided material for post-trip activities. Students were asked to compare life in the country they visited not only with their own culture, but also with the cultures of countries in other parts of the world. In the case of the Auschwitz trip blog, this very activity led to a collaboration between classes in Scotland and in Georgia, USA.

Much in the same way that blogs have transformed more traditional kinds of writing assignments such as essay writing and journals, they have also been used in projects supported by MFLE to transform the writing portion of internet-based research activities such as WebQuests. A WebQuest is a research activity where students gather, synthesize, and analyze information from web sites that are usually chosen in advance by the teacher. Students can work together in groups or pairs on WebQuests and are given specific steps and tasks that target the learning objective defined by the teacher. In the foreign language classes supported by MFLE, WebQuests had previously been developed and required students to read web sites in the target language in order to achieve a goal, such as buying a train ticket, planning a metro journey, or booking a hotel room. Teachers give students a challenge to solve on the WebQuests. The challenge comes in the form of a set of questions printed out and given to the pupils. Students go to authentic web sites in the target language to find the answers or information required to solve the challenge.

Teachers with whom MFLE worked typically found that WebQuests requiring between 10 to 40 minutes of work were ideal for the students. The WebQuest provides an opportunity for independent reading and writing as students worked their way through the challenge. With the traditional pen-and-paper WebQuest report, teachers felt that the pace at which students worked greatly affected the final product of the assignments. Students who rushed and wrote too quickly did not write sufficiently in depth; on the other hand, students who wrote too slowly tended to lose interest in the WebQuest. In one experiment with WebQuest blogs, the teacher used the timed-release feature of the blog software to release the challenge questions one by one over a period of days or weeks. The challenge questions were written in advance by the teacher and set to release automatically at pre-designated intervals. Many blogging software utilities have a timed-release feature. Through the use of the timed-release of challenge questions, the WebQuest could now take place over a number of weeks, and more importantly, be tailored by the teacher to suit the needs of the learners.

The use of the time-released feature allowed the teacher to customize the web-based research assignment in several ways. If the students exhibited a weak point during the course of study on a particular day or week, the teacher could add websites that contained relevant grammatical or vocabulary features for that day’s or week’s challenge question and resources for that challenge question. By monitoring and evaluating student responses to the current challenge question, the teacher was able to adapt the assignment in a way that provided additional support to continue the next phase of the assignment. The teacher could also take into consideration the pace at which students performed on the challenge questions and modify the subsequent challenge questions if needed. Each week’s challenge required 10 to 40 minutes and so did not take an excessive amount of weekly class time. Teachers wrote the challenges to end in a cliff-hanger each week that would keep the students guessing and, hopefully, thinking about the challenge until the next one. Students were able to comment on the challenge question and write their guess about what they thought they would be asked to do in the next challenge. This element of suspense heightened interest and the answers often gave the teacher an indication of the kind of task that would be well-received by students the subsequent week. Teachers reported that they did not feel the preparation time to create the challenge or monitor the blog was excessive. Most reported that they did not need more than ten minutes a week to develop the challenge and post it to the blog for each of the teacher’s classes doing that assignment.

One of the most easily identifiable benefits of using a blog in a writing assignment is the possibility of widening the readership for students’ writing. This potential feature in turn relates to the narrative voice used by writers and also can have an impact on students’ motivation to continue writing. However, simply publishing students’ writings on the internet with a blog does not necessarily guarantee a wide or committed audience. It does not take a great deal of effort to search the internet for blogs that have extremely limited readership. However, in education where entire classes are publicly sharing their views on a common subject, the audience is at least the size of the class and may also include parents, other family members, and the wider school community. Inviting parents and others within the school community to interact with the blog is one means of raising readership fairly easily. For example, the first school trip blog supported by the MFLE logged more than 7500 visits in just six days.

In the examples of the blogs that are described earlier in this paper, the teachers and students reported that they considered the learning activity a success. The blogs solved the problem of students who did not feel motivated to write a traditional pen-and-paper essay assignment by providing the incentive of writing for a wider audience. In addition, the blog assignments provided a way to share writing outside of class time, thus giving students more flexibility in developing thoughtful responses, more time to think about developing their written responses, and allowing teachers to use class time for other learning activities. Teachers who developed blog activities that were open to a worldwide audience reported that they had to spend time developing and nurturing the larger audience for their students. In a non-education setting, the blog audience typically grows by word-of-mouth and therefore much more slowly than is practical for a term-limited project. MFLE provided guidance to these teachers for growing and sustaining an audience for their students’ blogs. In all cases, the teachers were required to be proactive and some of the methods used included finding partner schools, enlisting parents, and recruiting colleagues at other institutions and other classes within the school to respond to the blogs.

Teachers reported that once an audience had been identified and introduced to the blog, they continued to find it necessary to provide very clear guidance to students for how to write to keep the audience engaged. For example, one teacher in the area of Modern Studies reported that her blog project met only limited success because of issues with developing and retaining an audience. In this project, four senior students were required to undertake a major research project based on comparisons between the UK and the US. The research project necessitated carrying out primary research, including conducting interviews with Britons and Americans to gather information about the public’s view of the health care system. A street questionnaire was used to gather the views of the British citizens, but the four senior students needed to find a more convenient way to gather opinions of the US citizens. The students decided to implement a group blog administered by the four students to gather data from the US citizens. The strict timeline imposed by the academic calendar posed a significant challenge to building an audience that could provide sufficient data for the students. The Scottish students’ teachers helped to remedy this situation by identifying and contacting a US teacher who located former students of voting age to respond to the blog. Teachers reported that the Scottish students’ motivation for the research project was strengthened by the increased activity on their blog. However, the teachers also observed that the motivation of the US respondents seem to decline over the term of the project. The teachers determined that the tone and type of responses provided by Scottish students to the US respondents dampened the enthusiasm of the US respondents for the project. The teachers remarked that Scottish students tended to keep their responses to the US respondents’ comments curt. When US respondents provided information on the blog they did not receive acknowledgement beyond a short “Thank you” statement. Therefore, the posts were made with decreasing frequency and the audience began to wane. Teachers remarked that the formal, impersonal voice used by the Scottish students might also have been found uninviting to the US respondents.

Teachers involved in this somewhat failed blog activity believed the failure could be partly attributed to the US respondents’ lack of interest in the subject and also to the difficulty the Scottish students had engaging their audience in the discussion. The teachers clearly felt that future blog projects would benefit by attending to students’ skills in cultivating and sustaining audience interest. The use of appropriate voice and tone, tips for responding effectively to the audience comments, and methods for communicating more clearly in the author’s or authors’ blog posts would be helpful topics to include in directions for future blog projects. Teachers also remarked that the blog assignment provided an opportunity to discuss voice in writing. Students were instructed to think about precisely who constituted their audience and to think about how to write in a voice that was appropriate for the subject and the audience. Drawing students’ attention to the different perspectives that their potential audience might hold helped them understand that different registers in tone and different vocabulary and terms could be interpreted differently by different reader groups. This awareness helped students expand their writing style and vocabulary in ways that they might not have had they been writing solely for the teacher. For less advanced classes the personal nature of writing a blog lends itself well to the personal writing they are expected to produce in the course of their 5-14, Standard Grade or National Qualifications study. Teachers also reported that by making students aware of the wider audience and the importance of writing style and persona, students were encouraged to use more sophisticated style and structures and to develop more fully their ideas. For example, in a short period of writing on the blog, a mixed ability S3 class increased its use of more complex structures to express and justify their opinion using phrases such as “je pense que….” and “à mon avis…” in place of previously popular simple structures such as “parce que c’est cool.”

As previously mentioned in this article another benefit of the blog was that the exercise of writing for a wider audience seemed to motivate the students. In the blog projects supported by the MFLE, the statistics for the France Trip travel blog seem to indicate high student motivation. In that blog project, students wrote about their experiences on a travel and study trip to France and posted their writings during the trip. Over the course of seven days 400 comments were left for the students which clearly indicated strong parental and peer interest in the activities the students described during their trip. Many of the comments responded to questions that the students had set out to answer through interviewing locals or through journal writing at the end of each day. Teachers working on the project reported that student motivation to carry out and complete required assignments such as writing the blog and creating audio reports was quite high. The students on the France Trip seemed particularly keen to work on the audio reports and were eager to speak French for the 8000 subscribers to their podcast radio show. Teachers remarked that the students did not always express the same enthusiasm to speak French in public in the classroom atmosphere. The MFLE recommended to the teachers to include a blogroll, or links to other related blogs on the main page of the blog, in future travel blogs in order to attract a larger audience that already reads blogs and listens to podcasts on similar topics. The use of a blogroll is one means of developing the audience for a blog.

The students in classes where these MFLE blog and podcast learning activities have been developed are in the K-12 age group, and therefore great care has to be taken to protect their identity. In accordance with national guidance on the matter, East Lothian Council, a school district to the East of Edinburgh, Scotland, created a webpage anyone in the community could edit, or a wiki, and set out the basic outline of a potential policy for self-publishing on the web by young students. After two weeks of open invitation to the community, edits and expansions of this text were made by parents, teachers, students, school managers, Education Authority leaders, and outside experts. The result is a comprehensive and positively-worded strategy and policy to encourage self-publishing of student work on the web, whether that be in written, photographic, audio or video form, while keeping children safe. A simplified version has been adapted to help explain its contents to younger children involved in self-publishing using blogs or audio podcasts. The main tenet of the policy is that children must not be identifiable by association. This tenet requires that students’ first names must never be published with their last names and their photographs can never published with any name. In addition to maintaining child protection for young self-publishers in the Scottish system, the policy has also provided teachers with the confidence to develop young people’s digital literacy skills further. The policy can be viewed, edited, copied and adapted for other schools.5

Creative writing is one way for even very young or very beginning language students to engage in writing in the foreign language. One example of a possible creative writing project using a blog could be a fairy tale assignment. Over the course of a six-week period, the fairy-tale project would have students read fairy tales, fables or short stories, and then have students write their own fairy tales either individually but with peer commenting or as a group project. In this kind of writing assignment, the blog would replace the word processor and the only technology required would be a computer with internet access to a blog web site. Discussion, peer support and brainstorming would be used in a face-to-face small group setting within the classroom. Since discussions are typically limited in any class due to time constraints, the students may not have adequate think to think and imagine their tale. In this context, the blog would allow students to share and develop their collaborative creative ideas via the online writing. Students would be able to keep track and record all their ideas and can even suggest possible next steps to the stories or poems being created by their classmates by using the comments feature of the blog. While some of the writing on the blog in this type of creative writing assignment would have to be done in class, the students could be assigned as part of a homework or library reading task to read the contributions of others. The contributions might be entirely in the target language or could also be a mixture of mother tongue and foreign language (franglais, spanglish…). In addition to the opportunity to write and collaborate on a creative project, this kind of assignment also allows teachers to share links to relevant authentic websites that might include fairy tales, poetry, or folklore in the target language. This kind of thoughtful interaction enables students, even young students, to explore more deeply a subject area than is normally possible within the constraints of the 45-minute lesson.

Increasingly students have their own communication devices such as mobile phones, personal digital assistants, and other hand-hand technologies at their disposal. Students commonly use these devices in their daily lives to communicate and to access and share information and so it seems logical to use these devices in education. One possible way to incorporate students’ own technologies into a blogging activity is to allow students to use their mobile phone to publish text, video, and audio to the blog. The process of publishing content to a blog using a mobile phone is called moblogging. The MFLE supported small scale pilot projects where students’ own technologies were used. Teachers who led moblogging activities reported that the pupils found the process of publishing to the site with their mobile phone quite simple. The project required that the teachers upload the students’ telephone numbers into the blogging service before students were able to publish. Teachers reported that student motivation to write short notes in the target language was very high in the pilot projects. Some students used the full range of services provided by their mobile phones and made short audio recordings with their phones as they travelled that they later published on the blog. One of the obvious ways that moblogging differs from blogging is that moblogging can be done from any place where the user has access to his or her phone service. The ability to write and post audio and video to a blog from anywhere opens up possibilities for language-related activities. Blog assignments can be done quickly and conveniently and do not have to be bound to a computer with internet access. Teachers considering using a moblog in a foreign language activity could consider different ways to take advantage of the fact that their students can publish on the blog while fully mobile and outside of the classroom walls. Elements to keep in mind include potential costs to students for making calls from their mobile phone. When using the personal technologies owned by students, it would be a wise idea to develop a parental permission form before undertaking the project. It would also be wise to offer students alternatives for posting to a class blog so that those without access would still be able to participate in the activity.