Today I saw another fantastic example of weblogs being used in an elementary school. M&M Online Magazine is a club of 6th grade students who are writing about different topics including school, society and the topics that are important to them.

I’ve heard people argue against weblogs by saying that they don’t serve any educational purpose. Isn’t teaching students to love writing worthy of the time and effort? One of the pages is dedicated to reviewing movies. No, that isn’t as ‘deep’ as if he were reviewing novels by Victor Hugo, but reviewing movies is authentic to him. It just might be something that he continues to do throughout his life for all we know. What we do know now is that it is something he enjoys doing, chooses to do and finds worthwhile.

I remember that in 6th grade, I read a book by choice for the very first time. My parents had bought it for me a few years earlier and were convinced that I’d never read it because it was too long. The book was Dragons of Autumn Twilight by Margaret Weiss and Tracey Hickman. Is that a novel that would be on the required reading list of any literature class? Of course not. However, my teacher encouraged me to read it and I enjoyed that book so much that I read the next two in the series soon after. Then I picked up another fantasy series. I couldn’t stop. I moved on to Stephen King and read most of his books. I got hooked. I wound up earning so much extra credit through reading that I got a 174% in my English class that year. I never looked back, and am still an avid reader.

What’s the point? The point is that I had a teacher that encouraged me to read. Not just educationally approved quality books, but just read for the enjoyment of it. Reading has since become a part of me. I can only imagine how my life would have been different if in 5th or 6th grade, I had a teacher who encouraged me to write in the same way I was encouraged to read.

I think if we offered our students the opportunity to take control of their writing, to write what’s important to them. Not just to complete an assignment, but just for the sake of writing. IN education we sometimes forget that we aren’t just teaching for a test. We aren’t just trying to complete standards. There are intangibles that these students either learn or they don’t learn. This may be radical to say, but I think it’s at least as important to teach them to love learning, to love reading and to love writing, than how to compute Pi to the 20th decimal place.

We have exceptional students at our school. All I want is to share them with the rest of the world. Is that too much to ask?

• Writing when it counts.
• Voices
• Students learning from Students
• BLC06: Literacy remixed
• The art of Learning to Learn

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