Do You Blog with Your Students?

As a teacher, I'm a lifelong learner. So this summer, I attended an ASCD conference to improve my knowledge of using technology effectively with my students.

Communicating in the digital age is something new to me, but it's the world our children live in today.  My primary school students don't know a world without the internet or the iPad. It was time for this old dog to learn some new tricks. 

One session focused on blogging with students.  It was presented by Sylvia Duckworth. During this session, I had an epiphany.  Blogging is writing for a REAL audience and for a REAL purpose.  

Sylvia Duckworth

When blogging, students use critical thinking, problem solving, creativity, and personal expression.  Students improve their written communication skills and also have opportunities for collaboration and cooperation, as well as, practice to develop their communication technology literacy skills. All of these are 21st Century Skills and vital to our students' future success.

Sylvia Duckworth

I began researching and reading lots of information/blogs on the internet and found some very helpful information. Blogging can be used in so many ways to teach writing skills to children. There are some free sites and lessons available from NCTE to help you start.

One idea I found was to create a Class Blog for primary/elementary school children where the teacher and children write the blog together, similar to the interactive writing approach.

For students in grades 6-12, ReadWriteThink.org has lesson plans and tips on how to manage student blogs, Teaching with Blogs .  

Blogging isn't just writing about something, it's a conversation between you and the world. Teaching children how to post a response to a blog is just as important as creating a blog post.  The posts to a blog should be thoughtful and engage the author and other readers.

Do you blog with your students? If so, please post tips and helpful hints. This is something I want to start at my school and we would really appreciate ideas to help us get started.

Thanks for reading!

Karen