Thomas (Teb) Locke

Teachers Teaching Teachers #27
November 1, 2006
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How can we sponsor and deepen the natural swarming that happens in student blogs on a social network? This complex question is where several teachers — Paul Allison, Lee Baber, Madeline Brownstone, Susan Ettenheim, Teb Locke, and Chris Sloan — seemed to be at the end of their conversation here. Teb talked about the kinds of committed writing he is seeing in his 3rd - 5th graders blog, their social network, and their wiki. We also talked about the differences from typical school writing that we are seeingthe personal, digital writing students are doing for their peers on blogs in The Personal Learning Space and Youth Voices.

Has writing really changed? What’s the difference — really — between writing an essay and writing a blog post? Has the use of images really changed the writing process? Digital technologies are great, but don’t we still have to teach kids how to write the way we always did? What’s the difference?