Why blogging?
Well as I said yesterday, I have a clearer idea in mind about why I want students to blog and what I want them to do on their blogs.
Last year, my idea was to use the blogs as a place for students to discuss the literature we were reading, especially focusing on an overarching theme of the American Dream as we made our way through American Literature. It had some success, but not much.
This year my goal has changed. I’ve really been rethinking how I am teaching writing this year and emphasizing writing much more in my classes. I spent the summer reading about teaching writing, especially Deborah Dean’s book, Strategic Writing: The Writing Process and Beyond in the Secondary English Classroom, Tom Romano’s book, Clearing the Way: Working with teenage writers, and Inside Out by Dan Kirby et al. I’ve decided to make writing a daily thing in my class and, staying with Dean’s idea, work much more on teaching writing strategies. In the past, much of the writing in my classes has been the end-of-unit-tell-me-what-you-know type of writing, rather than real writing for real purposes.
As part of making the writing a little more real, I want students to write for an audience larger than just me. Here is where blogs will be used. Rather than blogs being a place for their initial thinking, musing, or chatting, I’m having students use blogs as a place to put revised work, work that they are proud of and would like to share with the world. This is the place for taking the rough work they’ve done in class or in their journals and reworking and rethinking the ideas to share with others. We’ll see how it goes.
Last week students wrote personal narratives, shared them in small groups and now will be posting their revised drafts onto their blogs. Then they’ll have a chance to comment in writing on each others’ writing. I’m hoping for the best!
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October 23rd, 2006 at 11:47 pm
I think it is a great idea to incorporate blogging in the classroom because it really gives students the opportunity to intertwine our writing into our computer dominated culture. Teachers are assigning more and more research, reading and exploring on the computers because so much of our society is based upon technology. I find it very humorous that my sixty-year-old dad is having a hell of a time adapting to this new technology era because he refuses to learn about it. He is always asking for my brothers and sisters to help him do simple things such as a word document or an e-mail. I find his denial humorous because he is well en-route to retirement so he can choose to reject computers and not have it greatly affect him but our students are a completely different scenario. It is vital our students use the resources we currently have because their future depends upon this knowledge. Therefore, I think it is great for you to be incorporating such things as blogging into the classroom because there are a great amount of teachers who find “old fashioned writing” the most successful but more importantly, teachers should be granting students with a vast amount of education.
It is only appropriate our classrooms advance and change for the better as our society, right?!?