HOT Blogging: A Framework for Blogging to Promote Higher Order Thinking

Lisa Zawilinski

It is Sunday evening. With a steaming cup of English Breakfast tea by her keyboard, Stephanie LeClair (pseudonym) navigates to the blog she recently set up for her classroom. She is curious to see what her fifth-grade students have posted over the weekend.

Stephanie, a dedicated literacy educator, had recently incorporated a response blog into her curriculum. She felt doing so would integrate writing in a way that supported reading. Stephanie posted open-ended prompts to her blog about The Spiderwick Chronicles by Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi (2003). The prompts invited students to share their responses. In addition to integrating writing to support reading, classroom blogging prepared students for the new literacies of the Internet (Lankshear & Knobel, 2003, 2006; Leu et al., 2007).

Not having previously blogged herself, Stephanie began her journey by spending an hour with the school's technology teacher, Ms. Lowe (pseudonym). Ms. Lowe introduced her to Edublogs, at edublogs. org, one of the many free blogging sites for educators. By the end of the day, Stephanie had not only started her classroom blog but also started to connect in-school and out-of-school new literacies (Alvermann 2002; Hinchman, Alvermann, Boyd, Brozo, & Vacca, 2003; Hull & Schultz, 2002).

The weeks progressed smoothly. Stephanie was posting regularly and her students were commenting on the prompts she posted. Quickly, however, she began to sense student interest waning. Comments were becoming more brief, superficial, and formulaic.

Stephanie was worried about this development. She decided to go to her students, to find out what they could do together to use the blog in more thoughtful ways. Stephanie started an online discussion on the class blog, and her students shared these comments:

“Can I put one of my poems up there?”

“I want to be able to post questions to the blog and have my classmates answer them.”

“I really want to write about the book I am reading at home…not just what I think will happen next in Spiderwick.”

These comments opened up important issues for Stephanie, issues that are essential for all of us to consider as the Internet enters our reading and language arts classrooms.

The purpose of this article is to explore ways in which blogs can support literacy programs, especially to develop higher order thinking (HOT) while reading and writing. First, I will provide an introduction to and a theoretical rationale for blogging. Next, resources and ideas will be shared to help spark possibilities for blogging in an intermediate-grade classroom. Four common types of educational blogs will be presented. Finally, HOT blogging, an instructional framework that uses a blog to develop higher order thinking, will be described.

What Is a Blog?

A blog, short for weblog, is an easily editable webpage with posts or entries organized in reverse chronological order. Many different formats for blogs are emerging (Mortensen, 2008), and the features that are used depend on both the blogger and the tools provided by the blog host.

Typically, a blog consists of a header and two to three columns. Figure 1 depicts a simple three-column blog. The center column is often home to the most recent post (text entry) by the author. Reader comments (replies or responses to the author's post) on this blog can be found in the right-hand column. Blog comments can often be found immediately under the post to which the comments refer. The newest posts appear first, and all posts include both a title and date. The archive houses older posts and comments. This archive usually appears in the left- or right-hand column. The left-hand column in Figure 1 also includes a blogroll (i.e., links to other blogs or frequently visited websites) organized in list fashion and often by category. In this way, the author and interested readers can visit related blogs from one central location with ease.