Week 2--Why Blog?

How can you use blogging in your classroom? Explain a specific assignment you could give that could involve blogging.

Blogging has many uses in the classroom. It can be a way for students to comment on eachother's writing, thus providing peer feedback. It can be a means of reflection that is either shared or not, but is always archived for later viewing. Regardless of how you use blogging, the main thing is it is another form of writing that students can do and it will give them more experience at writing; and this time it can be for an audience.

My classroom assignments tend to be quite long assignments covering at least several class periods to complete. Reflecting on these assignments can be very valuable to students both as a means of processing what they have just done and also as a means of looking back at their previous trials and triumphs. I like to have students keep a blog of these reflections. I give them a prompt so they know where to start, and then they write about how the assignment went. I've had good luck with this and I believe that having students write about their experiences gives them an opportunity to do some self evaluation that might not otherwise happen.