The document discusses using blogs in the classroom to enhance writing and engagement. It outlines how blogs can be used for class discussions, writing prompts, homework assignments, and student portfolios. Blogs allow students to publish writing, provide peer feedback, and develop internet skills while fostering a writing community. Research indicates blogging can improve writing by creating a comfortable online space for students to collaborate and receive feedback on work.

1. Blogging in the Classroom By Amy Hudock (Pinewood Preparatory School)

2. Writing Prompt Please write a paragraph on the following writing prompt: When you hear the word “blog,” what is your response?

3. What is a blog? The word “blog” is short for “web log” Began being used by the innovators of the internet to track their movements on the web. Taken up as a diary form for personal publication Blogging programs made for first easy and direct web publication Now blogging going respectable

4. How can we use blogs for educational goals? Engage students in a writing community Create online student writing portfolios Track student writing across disciplines Foster writing across the curriculum Assess writing program progress Teach internet safety and appropriateness

5. Specific Applications Internal blogosphere -- a protected space vs. public blogs Class blogs controlled by teacher and posted on by students Student blogs controlled by students and posted on by other students

6. Class blogs Allow the teacher to: post questions or writing prompts for comments and discussion provide a list of homework assignments post a list of students’ individual blogs Sample: http://lwpwritinginstitutes.blogspot.com/

7. Student Blogs Help Students Allow students ownership of a creative, protected online space Take “classroom publishing” to a new level Make student work open to comments Develop good internet etiquette. Make them editors as well as writers Sample: http://ash- chas.blogspot.com /

8. Student Blogs as On-Line Portfolios follow students through their academic careers eliminate the need for paper portfolios. can be accessed from any computer can be viewed by students, parents, and administrators can be used to track a students progress

9. Create your own blog Go to http://www.blogspot.com Follow the directions to create an account (free) Follow the directions to create your blog Write down address and password and give address to Amy

10. Make Your First Post Open the MS window into which you typed your response about blogging Copy your response Go to your blog Click on “New Post” Paste your response into the editing window Hit “Save” or “Publish” Click on “View Blog” to see your new publication. Hit “refresh” if needed.

11. Blog Enhanced Writing Process Prewriting Drafting Initial Peer Response: fact-to-face peer editing Peer Editing on Blogs Teacher Comments on Blogs Revise and Bring New Hardcopy Draft for Face-to-Face Peer editing Turn in Paper (post and/or print)

12. What Students Say about Peer Editing on the Blogs Allows them to read the work of all their classmates They can judge their own paper against others They can get new ideas They learn to set up standards and judge against them They get good feedback from classmates They learn to write better by editing others

13. But is it improving their writing? Researchers tend to say “yes” and agree with Charles Lowe and Terra Williams: “weblogs can facilitate a collaborative, social process of meaning making, leading us to believe that weblogs . . . enable a comfort zone, a social environment where anxiety about the teacher and of school writing is reduced, while also drawing on other benefits of writing publicly”

14. Should you try blogging? Blogging can enhance what you already do It engages students Grading on-line homework and assignments is easy Can foster a writing community across your campus Can be fun!

15. Webliography An Empirical Test of Blogging in the Classroom http://www.higheredblogcon.com/index.php/an-empirical-test-of-blogging-in-the-classroom/ Steps Toward a Successful Classroom Blog http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/node/233 Power Surge: Writing-Rhetoric Studies, Blogs, and Embedded Whiteness http:// blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/foreword.htm

16. Webliography Introduction: Weblogs, Rhetoric, Community, and Culture http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/introduction.html Blogs as Virtual Communities: Identifying a Sense of Community in the Julie/Julia Project http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/blogs_as_virtual.html Remediation, Genre, and Motivation: Key Concepts for Teaching with Weblogs http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/remediation_genre.html

17. The Labyrinth Unbound: Weblogs as Literature http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/labyrinth_unbound.html Moving to the Public: Weblogs in the Writing Classroom http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/moving_to_the_public.html