blog in education

1. Tumblr as a Tool to Enhance Students’ Creative Writing
Winda Ayu Parasti
K2214056
Abstract
The rising of digital technology cannot be denied. It becomes an influential
phenomenon in education field. The students have free access to unprecedented amounts of
information. The challenge is how to use this facility to improve students’ activities in
learning language. The aim of this research is to prove that Tumblr can be used as a tool to
enhance students’ creative writing. This research is classified as action research. The subjects
of the research are thirty two students of the second grade of senior high school. Firstly, the
researcher gives the students writing prompt to stimulate their critical thinking. Secondly, the
students write their own developing narrative story based on the writing prompts and upload
it into their Tumblr account. The findings show that Tumblr can be used as a tool to enhance
students’ creative writing. Besides enhancing students’ creative writing, this method can
build their critical thinking as a need in 21st century skills.
Keywords: Tumblr, Critical Thinking, Creative Writing.
1. Introduction
The fact that digital era is rising up cannot be denied. Nowadays, students are
surrounded by information: through online media, articles, books, journals, newspapers,
magazines, and more recently through blogs, websites and social networks interfaces. They
have free access to unprecedented amounts of information out there. The challenge is how to
use these facilites to improve students’ activities in learning language.
Tumblr is the one example of microblogs and it is well-known in students’
surrounding. Microblogging, according to DeVoe (2009, p. 212), has main characteristics that
are freedom and brevity that makes it different from traditional blogging such as blogspot,
wordpress, etc. Microblogging puts its focus on common topics, design, and length. Viewed
as short pieces of information, microblogging does not require the author to arrange plan as
long as a traditional blog requires. Moreover, microblog lets the students to improve their

2. critical thinking about how to brief the text and keep it interesting to read. Therefore, this
study attempts to enhance students’ creative writing and critical thinking by using Tumblr.
2. Literature Review
2.1 Creative Writing
According to Maley (2012) creative writing concerns more to imagination rather
than facts. Also, he claims that the way how creative writing can arouse feeling and can
multiply readers’ interpretations are the most important thing of creative writing.
2.2 Microblogging
Microblogging is an activity of blogging that allows the users to share
information by using email, web, or instant messaging in no more than 200 characters
(Java et al., 2007, p. 56).
2.3 Tumblr
Tumblr is a well-known microblogging platform designed for creative self-
expression. Unlike Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites where users share
countless topics, Tumblr is considered as a sensible alternation. It lets the users to share
things in effective and rapid ways (Matteson, 2011, p. 54). It also has the same feature as
Twitter that allows the users follow other blogs. Matteson also said that some users view
Tumblr as a platform where Blogger, Twitter, and Facebook meet. The combination of
social networking and blogging provides a space that is both creative and collaborative.
In conclusion, Tumblr is becoming increasingly popular for a vast array of reasons, most
notably its accessibility to users and the important factor of community interaction.
3. Action Plan
3.1 Research Methodology and Subjects
In this research, the researcher uses form of action research. The reason why the
researcher uses action research because its fact that conducting to practical problem and
also require cooperation and collaboration from the teacher and the students (Burns,
2010, p. 2). This classroom research is conducted to enhance students’ creative writing
skills of thirty two students of the second grade of senior high school.
3.2 Sample Activities
Writing is not as simple as putting text on paper. It needs a long process from
planning until producing the final version of writing. Based on Karen and Christine

3. (2003, p. 41), the process of writing consists of 3 steps. These are the sample activities of
this research:
1. Prewriting
In prewriting, teacher gives each student writing prompt. The researcher gives
writing prompt in form of sentence, picture, or phrase. The function of giving a
writing prompt is to warm up and brainstorming.
2. Writing
After prewriting section, the following step is writing. In this section, the teacher
let the students write down what the things or plans for their narrative story
(drafting). After the drafting is done, the students may start write their narrative
story.
3. Revising
Before the students publish their work into their Tumblr account, the teacher let
them to revise their work in order to produce a better result.
3.3 Challenges
The challenge that follows is students’ knowledge of social network, which can
be far better from the teacher. In addition, the teacher must dig the understanding against
the development of social network in this digital era. Besides that, another challenge that
might be faced is the willingness of the students to start blogging and start writing.
3.4 Possibilities
Coming from the researcher’s interest of using Tumblr, this research provide the
influence and the good impact of using Tumblr as a tool to enhance students’ creative
writing. In the future possibility, acknowledge from some researches before, there still a
little amount of researches about implementing Tumblr in a classroom. Seen by the
developing of students’ thinking and curiosity in this 21st century skills era, the
researcher makes sure that this research will help future learning progress.

4. References
Burns, A. (2010). Doing Action Research in English Language Teaching. A Guide for Practitioners.
New York: Routledge
DeVoe,K.M. (2009). Bursts of information: Microblogging. The Reference Librarian,50:212-214
Java, A., Song, X., Finin, T., & Tseng, B. (2007). Why we twitter: understanding microblogging
usage and communities. In Proceedings of the 9th Web KDD and 1st SNA-KDD 2007
workshop on Web mining and social network analysis (pp. 56-65). ACM
Karen,B. & Root, C. (2003). Ready to Write. USA: Longman
Maley, A. (2012). Creative Writing for Students and Teachers. Humanizing Language Teaching,
14(3). Retrieved from http://www.hltmag.co.uk/jun12/mart01.htm
Matteson, A. (2011). Do You Tumble? Tumblr Could Change the Way You Blog. School Library
Monthly, 27(5), 54-56