Photos by MATT GENTRY The Roanoke Times

Blenna Patterson and her McHarg Elementary School students look for Serbia on a globe while talking about their blog. Geography lessons like this have become common this semester since Patterson and fellow teacher Carolyn Wojtera started using blogs in their classrooms to show off their students' writing and projects.

First-graders Nathan Cosmato (left) and Jack Frankenberger work on a blog entry in Blenna Patterson's class.

RADFORD -- Do you know how to locate Azerbaijan? Students in Carolyn Wojtera's first-grade class do.

"It's across the Atlantic Ocean," the McHarg Elementary School students exclaimed Monday morning after reviewing a comment on their classroom blog, "Wojtera's Words."

The online reader told students the country is between Russia and Iran, Turkey and the Caspian Sea. Wojtera rushed to the wall map to point out the spot.

Geography lessons like this have become common this semester since Wojtera and fellow teacher Blenna Patterson started using blogs in their classrooms to show off their students' writing and projects.

The teachers try to post a different classroom event, homework assignment, video, class project, math lesson or writing assignment to the blog every day. In some cases, students pen their own blog entries, and each student has a wiki page that can display his or her art or writing samples.

Often, visitors from around the world lend an unexpected geography lesson to the day. A mapping feature on the blog shows the location of each visitor.

"Every day they want to come in and look at the map," said Patterson, who looked up Serbia for her 7-year-olds after a red dot on the blog's map showed that an international visitor had viewed the page. "That has been the best geography lesson they have had."

In January, both teachers created sites using Edublogs, a software catering to teachers and schools. For years, school have used internal online sites to post homework and assignments, but the advent of easy-to-use blogging software means more teachers are opening their classes to the outside world and their students to new media.

In Radford, Patterson and Wojtera are front-runners, said technology director Harvey Boothe. They started tinkering with blogs this fall, hoping to use them to engage parents, and fully launched them in January.

Boothe said next year, he'll purchase additional software licenses for interested teachers and the two first-grade teachers might even lead a training.

"I think it's amazing that we're doing this with first-grade students," Boothe said.

The earlier students can start using technology, the better, Patterson said.

The blog "has really improved the kids wanting to write" and increased desire to learn about computers, she said. "If we teach them some productive ways to get that need filled, then maybe they won't go and look for worse things on the Internet."

The teachers estimate that as many as a third of students in their classes don't have an Internet connection or even a computer at home. But the school-based technology has students who are just now learning to read clamoring to write, look up words and share their work. Visitors, including parents, can explore writing and projects the first-graders have completed while students use the computer to play educational games that teachers post online and to see the latest addition to the blog.

"It gives them a purpose for learning. It engages them. It motivates them," Patterson said.

Every morning during class meetings, the teachers explore who has visited their blogs and the class writes responses to any comments readers made. Since late January, Wojtera has had 1,285 visitors from 27 countries, according to logs. Patterson has seen 998 visitors from 25 countries in the same period.

The teachers said they're seeing an impact on their students, and their families. Students ask to write online during reading and writing labs.

One student in Patterson's class, Conner Phillips, was a "sluggish" writer, she said. Now, after authoring short entries about a snow day and a teacher profile on the blog, he turns in page-long writing assignments.

"He has really enjoyed coming home each day and getting on the computer to share with us what he has been doing at school," his mother, Wendy Phillips, said.

Wojtera said the blog even led one parent to purchase a computer.