Anne brings up a key point about giving students more time to write.
I read somewhere recently that American schools are not giving students much time to write. Something like 69% of fourth grade teachers reported spending ninety minutes or less per week on writing activities. The time is even less as you go up in the grades. So maybe that’s reason enough. Let weblogs be the place for students to write on a frequent basis. That way we’ll be making writing a priority instead of just talking about it.
I really think that if we gave kids blog space early on and asked the to use it as a place to post their best practices and their reflections on learning and life the postive effects would be downright stunning. Everything in life is practice. In my few Zen moments, I remember this. And I used to tell my students this too. If you want to get better at running you have to run. Same with kissing and cooking and writing. (And, um, blogging too…)
I agree about the necessity of practicing writing (and the positive effect of blogging as a self-reflective writing tool). I wonder if the reduction of writing time is because the drive to standardized assessments in many schools has directed our pedagogical attention from process (a category in which I would place writing) to content. It is difficult to design a standardized assessment tool to measure process; designing a tool to measure content knowledge is (relatively) simple.