Chapter 10: Blogversing With Fifth Graders

Our chapter describes a research project exploring what happens when fifth graders blog and converse about literacies in class and beyond. Our work led us to new understandings of behaviors and relationships among students who became a community of bloggers over a period of a school year. We offer the term “blogversing,” to uncover the multiple layers and complexities of this experience as it relates to academic blogging in an elementary language arts classroom. Blogversing is explained in depth in the context of technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) (Mishra & Koehler, 2007), which allowed us to explore, analyze, and capture students’ work as bloggers in our research project. Prior to discussing our research, we will establish context with a short literature review of weblogs and blogging as literacy.