Student Feedback About Blogging in Book Clubs

I wanted to come back to Blogging in Book Clubs one more time, this time to share student feedback about the experience. Their last post for the unit was a response to what they learned by reading another student's post. In the student sample below, the student made some very sophisticated connections between his book Farewell to Manzanar which dealt with Japanese-American interment during World War II, and another book, Getting Away with Murder, which described the Emmett Till murder case in 1955:

While I was reading Abdullah’s power and the lack of power blog, i realized that there were many in his book which were related to mine, even though the settings and the plot of the stories were different. First of all, I noticed that the amount of power that the US government had over the Japanese Americans in Farewell to Manzanar was the same as the amount of power that the whites had over the blacks in Getting Away With Murder, and that this was certainly an abuse of power. This abuse of power however, led to inspiration for both the blacks and the Japanese Americans to stand up against this abuse, like for example when a couple months after all of the Japanese Americans were put into Internment camps, thousands of them decided to stand up against their abuse so they started huge mobs and riots inside Manzanar. By reading Abdullah’s blog, i was able to relate and connect to many of the events in his book to mine. I also learned that there were several other races that were discriminated in the US throughout the history of America apart from Japanese Americans.

Later, I asked students to do a quick reflection on the unit using a "3 stars and a wish" format, usually 3 things they learned or liked, and one suggestion or thing they wished had been different. This time I asked for one "I learned", one "I liked", one comment about the blog, and a wish. Here are the top types of comments about the blog experience:

Deepening understanding:

• I was able to understand the Social Justice Question better by reading other people's answers. 
• Blogs helped me have a clear understanding about my book. 
• I learnt many different points and it made me think in different ways. 
• I thought the blog helped us learn about others' issues and writing and analyze our own.

Tech skill: 

• I learned how to make and format a blog post correctly.

Writing to learn:

• It helped me express my thoughts more clearly. 
• I liked the blogs because it made organization easy. 
• I liked how we could express our own interpretation of the social justice questions. 
• Blogs were good for writing down our thoughts.

Engaging: 

• I really enjoyed doing the blogs. 
• I liked being able to blog rather than write in a notebook. 
• I liked the blog because I have bad handwriting. 
• The blogs were a fun way to share information. 
• I liked how easy it was to share ideas on the blog.

Discussion forum: 

• I thought that it was a safe and fun way to talk about your book. 
• I liked using blogs because you can have a proper conversation and this way you won't forget what you've said. 
• I believe blogs were a good way to communicate and share different opinions. 
• I liked the blog because we could have a discussion on it over more time instead of class.

Negative reactions:

• I wasn't very fond of blogging; I would rather write it down. 
• I don't like blogs because it piles on the amount of work that had to be done. 
• The blog work was good but people should've been more reflective. 
• The blogs were hard to remember to do. 
• I think we could have used the blog in better ways by having more cyber discussions.

So not everyone loved blogging. That's OK. I'll probably structure it better next year, now that I know what I'm doing. In general, though, most students liked the blog and found it to be beneficial in some way. It's good to hear from them what worked and what didn't work.