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Photo Credit: Jen Roberts |
Why do I teach my students about blogging? Why not?
I've done a variety of different blogging projects with students over the years. The first was probably in 2000 or 2001, when I set up a single web page for my 7th grade class on our school server. The idea was to have a different student everyday write an entry at the top of the page about our class that day. I didn't even know this was a blog. I told the computer lab teacher about it and she said, "Oh yeah, that's a web log or a blog." It had none of the features of a blog today, not comments, no archive, and most likely no actual audience.
By 2006 I had moved to a high school and started a blog for my class with Blogger (still my platform of choice). It was just a weekly recap of what we had been doing in class that week and I was the only author. In the spring of 2008 my classroom went 1:1 and I was ready to try a blogging project with students, but there were so many students. I found a way to break it down.
For our last unit of the year we did a blogging project about issues facing the world. Students generated a list of the typical pressing issues, global warming, terrorism, water shortages etc. I asked each student to list their top three issues of interest and then used their interest cards to group them into teams. Each team started a blog about their topic and added posts as they did their research. It worked pretty well. By using group blogs I had fewer blogs to keep up with. Students collaborated well and went much deeper than ever before into the research on their topics. But the year ended all too soon.
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Photo Credit: Jen Roberts |
I wish I had great stories to tell about miraculous things that happened because my students are blogging. Perhaps that will come in time. But, I also don't have any horror stories about bad things that happened either. I get my students blogging because it's a great and purposeful way of getting them writing. I hope blogging might be something that will help them in the future. I know that experience writing about their research and their thinking is something that they will need, so why not do some of it on a blog.
Now please excuse me while I go write this out on notebook paper, so I can give it to my teacher.