Many teachers assign their students writing journals or reading logs to track their writing progress throughout the year, but why not try something that can really get your students excited and teach them valuable 21st century skills?
Try having students set up their own personal blogs to fulfil some of the requirements of the Language curriculum!
Blogging could be an appropriate assignment for grades 6 and up, depending on how tech-savvy your students are. While it’s fine to be teaching them the nuances of designing a blog of their own, you don’t want to be doing tech-support for basic tasks the whole time.
Here are 5 great reasons why you should shelve the journals and get online:
1. Teaches skills beyond simply writing
A blog is an excellent forum for teaching skills and assessing curriculum beyond the language arts curriculum too. A blog post is a form of writing like any other and with it there are certain conventions that make good and bad posts. I’m still struggling to perfect my execution of blog posts! It’s tricky because I’m verbose and Internet readership doesn’t take kindly to Proustian rambling. Your students will have to learn this too.
Unlike a journal, blogs are visual, which many of your students are sure to enjoy. Students will need to apply the elements and principles of design from the Visual Arts curriculum to make sure that it is visually appealing in addition to coherent and grammatically correct. Remember not to let them fall down the Internet rabbit-hole searching for the perfect image though (we’ve all been there).
Blogs are also an excellent means of teaching your students about academic integrity and copyright. If they want to make reference or use a photo that is not their own, they must learn how to cite it appropriately. I don’t know about your students, but I have never had a student that was particularly excited about citation methods. However, with the proper motivation e.g. they want to make their blog look cool, they will most likely learn how to cite much faster than if they were putting a quote in a paper.
2. Keeps students accountable
When students are writing a journal, they know that pretty much the only person who is going to read it is you. As such, some students do not always put forth their best effort. However, with a blog, their writing is online for all to see.
The thing most preteens and teens want more than anything in the world is to be cool, or at the very least fit in enough to avoid harassment. Knowing that what they write is going to be online may motivate some students to write better because the last thing they want is for someone to read their work and think it’s silly.
Apart from that negative motivation, many students will also experience positive motivation in writing a blog. I know the students at my last placement were SO EXCITED to post their artwork in the hallways around school (they could pick any hallway they wanted, which was a big deal), so think how excited students would be to share their hard work with anyone with an internet connection?
I’m sure you’ll be surprised and proud of how much effort your students will put into their blog compared to a journal that stays in their desk.
3. Helps them become responsible digital citizens
Digital citizenship is an increasingly essential aspect of education, but how to fit it into the curriculum? The blog is an excellent medium. Some of the nine elements of digital citizenship you could teach students about through building and maintaining a blog are:
- digital literacy
- digital communication
- digital etiquette
- digital security
- digital law
Those are just the elements I thought would fit tidily, but I’m sure you could incorporate more if you wanted. Let me know if you do!
It is important for your students to understand that their online presence matters, especially for their future careers. This applies more for older students, but depending on their prospective career, it may even be appropriate to put a link to a well-written blog on their resume.
4. Provides an easily accessible record of their progress for other educators
Sometimes when teachers start a new year or get a new student from a different school they have plenty of information about that student, their abilities, interests, any IEP, etc. However, many times teachers have to be adaptable because they get little to no information on new members of their class.
If you set up a blog with that student, the student’s new teacher has an immediate insight into their writing level and interests. This makes it easier to build rapport than merely reading an IEP or previous report cards. By having your students blog, you make it easier for their future teachers to get to know them and their skills.
5. Inspire a lifelong passion
Blogs are versatile. You can structure the assignment any way you want. Either give the blog a fixed topic, for example a reading log, or give students the option to write on many different topics. They can post assignments from other subjects they’re proud of, or post on topics of interest be it sports or video games.
Who knows? You might find them writing on the blog even if you haven’t assigned them a post. They may even find they enjoy sharing their thoughts so much they keep it up as a hobby the rest of their lives.
Have any ideas about student blogging? Write a comment or send me a message!
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