Blogging in Education

An amazing teacher I know at PS1 here in Denver is looking at ways of engaging her high school students in thoughtful dialogue – using the Internet.

This teacher already “friends” (and is “friended” by) some students in MySpace, even though it sounds like that site may get blocked this year from their campus.

She also “texts” by cell phone with students. (“For a few of them, that’s the only way they’ll let me know they can’t make it to class…”)

So we were discussing blogs and blogging, and she was thinking about how to get kids to thoughtfully dialogue. It occurred to me that a new tool that emerged from the Boulder-based start-up incubator program Techstars might be exactly what they need: Intense Debate. It allows you to track the comments of registered users across other blogs, and even subscribe to them in RSS.

So, this teacher could have each student blog about the subjects at hand, and also require students to read other students’ blogs and post comments. The teacher could then easily track both what each student (one at a time) has contributed across all the forums, and all the topics. And yes, give them feedback and an evaluation (ie, grade) based on that. Sounds like they’ll probably do it. Pretty neat.