Planning to Scale: Teaching Teachers to Blog

As we've round the corner in Year Two of the Learning Portfolio project, we are revving up our thinking about how we should scale and spread the Learning Portfolio model to other schools, organizations, and networks. Our goal is not to create a singular "how-to" curriculum package that we hand over to other educators. We recognize that digital portfolios come in different platforms and colors and will have to fit different contexts. So we are trying to shape a variety of ways to share our  key design principles, needed technical skills, and pedagogical approach.

One of our first attempts in developing a formal workshop on blogging skills to a new audience happened last week at DreamYard's School Programs' Conference Day. This is a full day of professional development that our teaching artists and public school teaching partners attend to deeper their practice in arts education. One of our returning educators, Moriah Carlson, and I led the workshop called Bring in the Blogs: Digital Learning Portfolios in the Classroom.


Our goals for the workshop were to:

1. Discuss with educators how blogs can be used as a teaching tool and help them develop their own learning portfolio as a teacher
2. Teach the basic technical skills to get started blogging with Blogger

The beginning of the workshop included taking a look at Moriah's wonderful teaching blog for her Art Center Fashion program. We started by looking at different posts that Moriah shows her students in class to teach them a new concept. Moriah asked our workshop attendee's to hold up a card with one of three "hashtags" to describe what kind of post we were looking at.

These hashtags were:

• #inspiration (used when posting another person's work to inspire)
• #research (used when posting information about a person, place, or idea)
• #process (used when posting to show how someone made something or a work in progress)

The point of this exercise was to help the educators in the workshop to better understand the purpose of "tagging" posts as an information organizing tool, but also three key kinds of posts that educators can include on a class blog or ask students to post. As a follow up to this exercise, we encouraged the educators to think about how they could use a blog not just to document their class, but as an active tool used in the classroom to inspire and inform their  students. In addition, as educators add more posts it also becomes an archive (or portfolio!) of their own teaching practice.

We then turned to the technical aspects of getting started on Blogger. To make the process a little more fun and visual we create a "badging" system using stickers. The workshop attendees learned the following five steps and received a sticker badge when they showed it was complete:

1. Blog Builder - Create a blog using Blogger
2. The Describer - Create a blog description and have a neighbor proof-read it 
3. Postasaurus - Create your first post: A quote from an "artivist"
4. Picture Perfect - Create your second post: A picture of an "artivist"
5. Tag-tastic - Tag your posts using the tags you learned earlier and anything else that helps organize them

Our educators were quick learners and helped each other through each step. We ran the session twice during the day and everyone that was able to stay the full time was able to complete each step and start a blog.

Another sub-goal of the workshop was to help educators feel less fearful about technology and get comfortable trouble-shooting themselves. To help facilitate this we introduced some trouble-shooting tips that encouraged the educators to try something themselves, ask a neighbor, or Google it before they ask the teacher. 

This list was inspired by how our Maker class runs at the DreamYard Art Center. The Maker educators have supported the young makers in how to teach themselves at times and solve their own problems instead of relying on their teachers. This approach of encouraging trouble-shooting can help educators with classroom management in larger classes when using numerous devices at once.

All in all, these workshops were a success in helping the educators think in new ways about how blogs can support their teaching, as well as in how to get started with blogging. We're hoping a next step may be a follow up workshop where we explore creating more in-depth posts and learning how to customize the look of a blog. Stay tuned!