Thanking Students for Their Work

When was the last time someone from outside your school thanked your students for the work they were doing?

An eighth grade English teacher, Jessie Thaler, says that being thanked was the most surprising effect of having her students blog. Her students weren’t used to being appreciated for what they do. Being visible and findable online means that her students’ work can be appreciated. And it should be; check out what her students have written. (Those of you who have taken or facilitate Cultural Competence: A Transformative Journey will recognize the “Where I’m From” poems as a similar activity from one in that course.)

That idea of being “findable” is our blog theme this month. One of the benefits of Web 2.0 technology is that it gives us the opportunity to make learning visible online. In Building Online Collaborative Environments, we talk about being “clickable.”

When we talk about making students “clickable,” we mean making them accessible to search engines and making it easier for people to find them and their work. It’s much more difficult for students to build their learning networks if no one else can find them (or at least their content).

When Jessie Thaler’s students post to her blog, they are building a learning network. They are making connections with others that would be difficult or impossible without this technology.

Being visible means students have an authentic audience for their work. How many hours did you spend in school writing papers that no one read besides you, your teacher, and maybe your family? Knowing that others can read their writing can be very motivating for students. High school math and computer science teacher Chris Higgins has written about the motivating effect of a map showing locations of visitors to his classroom site. Students are so excited about these global visitors that they check the stats on weekends and use Google Earth to explore the locations.

This also means we all have an easy way to support other educators, even if we can’t visit their physical classrooms. We can thank students for sharing their work; we can be the authentic audience that helps motivate them.

Now I have a favor to ask of you. Can you please find some student work posted online and be their audience? Thank them or give them feedback; just go comment and let them see that their work is appreciated. Look through the featured posts from Class Blogmeister for some inspiration (to leave a comment, click the teacher’s name and then look for the student entries in the left navigation of the classroom blog). You can also try this list of classroom blogs, although some of these blogs aren’t currently being updated. If you know of some great student blogging happening, please share the link in the comments below.

Thank you!

Image Credit: cc licensed flickr photo shared by psd