Log off and zone out

I spent my 4th of teaching as a History and Technology teacher. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into.

My passion and love of reading have driven my classroom instruction and graduate studies. I was more than a little skeptical about the impact of technology on emergent literacy. I believed that technology was teaching students to become more distracted and inhibiting literacy development.

I was wrong.

I saw the light around February. I saw students who were engaged completely and who were talking about what we were doing in class outside of class. I saw students who were doing working at home even when they weren’t assigned homework. I saw students collaborating without my having to ask them.

The key: blogging.

I know what you are thinking. I thought so too, but blogging provides a way to extend learning outside of the classroom that every teacher should be using as much as possible.

I’m not the only teacher who is realizing this. One og my fellow teachers decided to assign all of her summer reading through blogging. What she is discovering is that she is already getting to know her students as readers and writers BEFORE she has even has them in the classroom.

Another teacher has started a blog with her Sunday school class and has discovered that some of the college students who have never ever uttered a word in the class have written multiple blog posts. Her college students are also commenting on each other’s posts so that an authentic, real discussion is already in the works before they even meet.

So why are we as churches and teachers saying no to this possibility? Why are we asking students to log off and zone out rather than saying log in and zone in?