What is a blog? According to the Wikitionary.org, a blog is “a website that allows users to reflect, share opinions, and discuss various topics in the form of an online journal while readers may comment on posts. Most blogs are written in a slightly informal tone. Entries typically appear in reverse chronological order.”
What is blogging? According to the Wikitionary.org, blogging is “the design and editing of a blog.”
Thousands of people blog every day about every and any topic you can imagine.
How can teachers repurpose blogging to innovate literacy curriculum?
One way would be to use blogging as a tool for students to respond to literature. Students could blog their predictions, connections, inferences, and thoughts as they read novels, poems, short stories, newspaper articles, etc. Students could also share their responses to text features, such as flashbacks, alliteration, metaphors, symbolism, etc. Another way students could respond to literature with blogs is to share book reviews. Blogs often include images, videos, and links to other websites, so the blog can be simple or complex depending on the teacher’s instructional goals, student motivation, and access to technologies.
Blogs can also be used in classrooms as a collaborative tool to enhance the writing process. Students could post rough drafts of their writings and classmates or even older students (from upper elementary or middle/high school grades) could offer feedback, suggestions for improvement, and praise. Students would then complete the editing and revising stages of the writing process and post their final draft on the class blog so students could see their own progress/improvement and all students could benefit and learn from each other’s work.
Blogs could also be used to encourage deeper discussion of content. Often students are hesitant to share their thoughts, questions, or ideas in class for fear of sounding “dumb” or being “wrong”. On top of that, there are usually one or two students that dominate the discussion and others do not have an opportunity to express themselves. Giving students time to blog after a verbal discussion of content will ensure that all students have an opportunity to participate in the discussion. Students would comment on their peers’ blogs and the online discussions has the potential to expand knowledge, reinforce main ideas, answer questions, clear up misconceptions, enrich content, etc.
I believe blogs can be a powerful tool for student assessment. Each student could have a page on the class blog that showcased all their projects, number of book/genres read, videos, papers, published stories, etc, that would serve as their “portfolio”. Having all the students work documented digitally, in one place, would give the teacher (students and parents) an opportunity to assess student growth more efficiently. Additionally, sharing these artifacts on the class blog give students a larger audience, this increases motivation and brings more meaning to the content.
It is important to note that blogging can only be successful in the classroom if the teacher and students are willing to put in the effort to make it a meaningful experience.
Image of young students blogging from the website: http://kidslearntoblog.com
I like your ideas of using a blog to post a rough draft and having the students peer review the draft. I think that is a great way to communicate and for other students to work on their writing skills. Blogging for literature was also a great point you brought up for students to post predictions and make connections. Blogging is a great tool for communication and I think students can use blog to communicate with their peers about what happened during the week and other things they want to share with their classmates. I also think blog would be a great way to communicate with parents about the weeks plans and what has happened during the week.
ReplyDeleteI really liked your use of a blog for upper elementary. I think you are absolutely right in this aspect. They can post drafts, feedback, and have a peer support network. The teacher can be a facilitator but students can begin to rely on each other for help.
ReplyDeleteWhen I think about blogging, I think about it as a tool to communicate with parents about our day to day classroom activities. I think I've talked about this before in some of my other posts.
I see you posted this Tuesday, so I must be even farther behind than I thought. I agree that blogging is a great assessment tool and that it is a great way for the students to be interactive and give each other feedback. I know you posted this before our Skype visitor, but she also talked about the students who don't normally contribute in spoken discussion tend to feel more comfortable in a text setting. In my placements some of my smartest higher order thinking type students were some of the quiet ones because they feared giving a wrong answer even once or saying something that was silly and make others laugh - even if it would have been totally fine and called for. I think blogging would be a great opportunity to get them out of that shell. With any student who does not get much discussion in during class time the teacher could even tell the class they read some great posts online and that they wanted to have a few people share their posts with the class. Blogging could really be used to boost some students' confidence through experiences like that.
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