We are about to start second semester, so I thought this would be a good time to start my students on blogs. After setting mine up and seeing what fun I could have with it, I decided it would be a great tool to use in the classroom. I had a couple students stay after school yesterday, and I helped them set up their blogs.
I explained to them that I wanted to replace daily logs with blogs. Daily logs are news logs for my journalism students. Each day they come in, check the news, and write a short blurb about the top stories. Last year we started doing them in Google Docs. Students started a new document each week and shared it on Fridays. Prior to Google Docs, they did this on a handout. Going to Google Docs was great because it eliminated the paperwork; however, it meant that I was getting 20 to 30 new Documents a week (in addition to newspaper/yearbook stories and work from other classes) and it got overwhelming at times. When I was reading about and looking at blogs earlier this week, I realized that they could be the next "new" way to do logs. With the blogs, students will still come in and have time to check the news. However, they will now reflect on it in their blog and they will be required to post comments on their classmates blogs. I hope this stimulates discussion/conversation about current events among them because we don't always have time to talk about what they read in class.
After explaining my idea to these two students, they seemed interested. At first they were like "oh no, not another new way," but when I was finished they said "it looks pretty cool." I showed them how they can personalize their profile and this seemed to really appeal to them (they compared it to Facebook). They also liked that they could watch the news at home and blog too (they could watch the news at home and respond in Google Docs, but they didn't seem to think about this).
I'm looking forward to seeing how the blogging works this semester.
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