BROOKLYN, New York - At Brooklyn International High School, perched at the edge of the Manhattan Bridge, everyone's a newcomer to the U.S. This nine-year-old public school has built a solid reputation for serving the needs of immigrant students whose native language might be Haitian-Creole, Bengali, Arabic, Chineseanything but English. The school is small by design, with just 320 students attending classes in a former torpedo factory. It incorporates instructional teaming and other features intended to build a sense of community. For teachers like Joe Luft, this makes an ideal environment for introducing innovative ideas to the classroom.
About a year ago, Luft happened to read a magazine article about weblogging. Weblogs are online spaces for interactive publishing. The software allows the writer and audience to engage in dialogue. Luft began thinking about potential benefits for his students, for whom language acquisition is a primary goal. What if their writing assignments weren't just turned in to the teacher, but instead were published online? What if the technology would allow classmates, family members, friends, and others to read and respond to students' writing?
At the end of the school day, students cross the bridge to Manhattan.
"I want my students to feel like they have a public space to write," he explains. "There's a power to publishing that can't be reproduced. I want them to write for a real audience, for a real purpose. And I want them to get instant feedback from readers other than the teacher."
Luft spent the summer of 2002 working on the technical side of weblogs. When he ran into questions, he turned to the technology department of the Alternative Schools Program, City of New York Department of Education. Throughout his six years of teaching at Brooklyn International High School, he has taken advantage of the department's technical support and opportunities for ongoing professional development.
Although Luft is an adept user of technology and a tech leader among his colleagues, he found he had much to learn about this online publishing tool. Weblogs are relatively easy for users to navigate, but they take some back-end work to set up on a server. After an intense summer, Luft was ready to introduce two of his humanities classes to the new tool. He set up each student with a personal weblog and password, and reserved the school technology lab for weekly writing sessions.
Student response was positive right from the start. "I love writing this way," says Mohamed, a student from Senegal. "My work is neater. I wind up writing more, because I can get my ideas down faster. When you're writing by hand, your fingers can't keep up with your thoughts." Even better, he says, is the interactive aspect of weblogs. "You get to talk to people this way. We can write comments to our classmates. Maybe we agree; maybe we disagree with something they have written." The highlight for Mohamed was the day a teacher in Italy posted a comment on his weblog. "What's someone from Italy doing reading my work? That's exciting. It makes me really want to write."
Luft has long known that having an authentic audience provides students with motivation to write. In the past, he's tried to teach students how to design their own Web pages to provide them with publishing spaces. "But that took up a big chunk of class time and produced very little student work online," he says. With weblogs, he had students publishing online from the very first day. "This is a way to facilitate writing without a lot of technical instruction."
One project, in particular, convinced Luft of the power of weblogs to motivate and engage students. He envisioned doing a unit on the Spanish-American War with a focus on the experiences of those living in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Textbook resources were slim, however. "There's not much available, especially from viewpoints other than Teddy Roosevelt's," Luft says. He told students they would have to do their own research, with findings to be posted to a Spanish-American War weblog. He explained to them, "You're going to write the textbook. What are you curious about?"
To assist with information gathering, Luft enlisted an online expert. Mariola Espinosa is a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina whose research focuses on the history of the Caribbean region. She agreed to answer students' questions online.
As students worked in teams to create online resources about the events leading up to the Spanish-American War and related topics, Luft was delighted to see some of them taking on the interpretive role of historian. "Students often tend to see history as inert, a set of facts. They aren't working out the meaning for themselves or looking at different viewpoints. That's an obstacle," he says. Weblogs create a forum where students can take positions, debate viewpoints, and respond to one another's writing.
For students who are still mastering academic English, weblogs relieve the pressure of having to debate aloud. Luft was delighted to see one girl, who rarely speaks in class, express herself more fully on her weblog. "She's not as comfortable in class because of her English fluency. She doesn't have the control of language to have a debate. But online, she can express herself." Using weblogs also gave Luft a perfect opening to teach students "how to make constructive criticism."
Sarah Newman, the principal who founded Brooklyn International High School, has been impressed by the quality and quantity of writing generated by Luft's class weblogs. "These students are doing writing that they wouldn't have done otherwise," says Newman, a former writing teacher herself. "To be writing for other students, for a public audience, is powerful motivation. And with our population, the more opportunities we can create for students to use, speak, and write English, the better."
By the end of the Spanish-American War project, students gained the satisfaction of knowing they had created a new resource for others to use. "One student's younger sister used the site to do her homework," Luft says, and others have linked to the site from their own Web pages.
Luft conducted his own action research to find out what students thought of the weblogging experience. His two key findings: "Students think more about what they write because they know someone else will read it. And every student has showed his or her weblog to someone outside of school. Some have even translated their writing for parents." From this veteran teacher's viewpoint, that's powerful evidence that weblogs deserve a lasting place in the classroom.
Luft shares more insights about educational weblogging on his own site, http://www.brooklynjoe.com*.