Turn Them Loose and Let Them Blog

Blogging continues to be one of my (Jamie's) favorite ways to integrate technology into my English classroom.   This year I am exploring using blogs to provide my students with the opportunity to write about a topic of personal interest.  There is much research out there to support allowing students to choose freely.  In the words of Lucy Calkins, “Choice matters. Not a little, but a lot.”  

What do you like to do in your free time?
 What type of books do you like to read?
What kind of foods do you like to eat?

To kick off blogging this year, we did a lot of brainstorming about personal interests.  I started with a simple stick figure.  Students were asked questions, and then they were given a few minutes to respond with corresponding thoughts/ideas on their stick man/woman.

The center represents things we love the most.

A few days later, we drew a heart map in our journals to provide us with a space to write all the things we are passionate about.  This activity is taken from Nancy Atwell’s Lesson that Change Writers.

When I felt my students had cultivated enough ideas, we began discussing blogs.  In our book Literacy Lessons for a Digital World, Meg and I suggest having your students view the Common Craft video on blogging to introduce any blogging lesson.  The video provides a clear explanation of what a blog is and how it is used.  Before blogging, I also shared mentor text.  My mentor text was of course a blog.  I showed them our JMLiteracy blog. We discussed my interest in ed-tech, and why I would choose that topic to blog about with Mrs. Knapik.  Modeling for your students is a key component to good teaching.  By showing my students that I am a blogger, I am showing kids that I practice what I “preach”. 

My students were then assigned the task of drafting their first blog post.  Their goal was to write an introductory post about themselves and their blog topic.  We took our blog post through the writing process, and then we published to our classroom blog.   The kids were really excited because they knew their audience was beyond the scope of just the teacher’s eyes.

Wait!  It gets even more exciting.  After posting, I took blogging one step further.  I collaborated with another English teacher in my building to provide an audience for my students’ blogs.  Mrs. Horrigan’s sixth graders read my seventh graders’ blog posts and left comments on their blogs.  When my students saw that comments were left on their blogs by other students, the bar was further raised.  My students immediately began comparing who got more comments, and I used this as a teachable moment.  Why did some posts get read more than others?  We went through the blogging checklist (scroll to bottom of this link to download checklist), and we discussed the characteristics of the blogs with the most traffic.

Take a look at a few of my students introductory blog posts and feel free to leave a comment.

Fashion Blog
DIY Blog
Reading Blog
Free Time Blog
Nature Blog