December 2005 — Features
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Why Blog?
California’s Blogging High School
Recently featured in The New York Times, San Francisco’s Galileo Academy
of Science and Technology calls itself “California’s Blogging High
School.” Visit the school’s Web site (www.galileoweb.org),
and you will find that its content is almost completely blogging. In fact, you
can visit the online Li-Blog-ary, learn about the class of 2005’s plans
for its first reunion in 2025, and read student and teacher blogs in English,
Spanish, and Chinese.
Social studies teacher Joel Arquillos says that blogging was introduced at Galileo by school librarian Patrick Delaney, who has been “tirelessly promoting the usefulness of the blog as a learning and writing tool.” Through funding from the Bay Area Writing Project (www.bayareawritingproject.org) and the National Writing Project (www.writingproject.org), the school’s blog project is working to inspire the creation of a teacher blogging community, to make access to school or classroom information easy to find, and to help students build writing skills by learning the power of audience.
Arquillos says he started using blogs with his students because he wanted to
make his classroom available beyond the classroom doors. “I like the fact
that it is a living document. Students, parents, teachers, and the community
can ‘comment’ or ‘discuss’ the stories I post,”
he explains. “I’ve had parents tell me that they appreciate being
able to know what their students are doing in class.”
—posted on Sunday, December 4, 2005 @ 12:10 am
Blogging to the ‘Other Side of the World’
With the help of the network of teachers in the National Writing Project and
librarian Delaney, students in one of Arquillos’ classes began an exchange
of ideas via blogging with students in Maine—or, in their view, “the
other side of the world.” The result was an open forum where kids from
two different environments used writing to communicate their opinions, fears,
desires, you name it. Dubbed the “Maine to California blog,” the
project gave kids freedom to discuss with an audience issues they found important.
And, according to Arquillos, the students also “learned the power of writing
and being able to defend their views.”
