As an English teacher, I am both intrigued and elated by the idea of creating a weblog for my students. There is so much potential in blogging - not only to challenge students with their writing skills, but also to create a place for students to make personal connections to the text. In addition, I see blogging as an opportunity to showcase student work as well as their personal interests.
My students are currently studying short stories. Most recently, they each chose a short story of their own. The culminating activity for this unit is a short story book fair where students will be showcasing their individual projects chosen from a teacher created list of ideas. At this time, students will circulate the classroom looking for short stories that they want to add to their reading list. Beginning with a blog assignment would be motivational and genuinely new experience for my students. My goal is to utilize blogging with my students by having them write a book review for their short story. With blogging, I am no longer their audience. They would be writing for their peers throughout the 9th grade. Furthermore, if asked to comment on at least two of their peers reviews, they are utilizing their reading skills, learning how to evaluate each others' writing, and using the complete writing process to publish their work. This would be a great way to set the tone and the expectations for the final project.
After Christmas break, we will begin our poetry unit. During this unit, I would like to have students post their original pieces for critical review by their peers. Students would be challenged to include various forms of figurative language, sound devices, and symbolism - thereby creating an assessment for their peers. In turn, students would be ask to identify and interpret these literary devices found in each others' work .
Finally, Romeo & Juliet offers a plethora of weblog ideas that would be both engaging and motivational for my students. For example, students could work in small groups to write character sketches for various scenes. In addition, students could respond to essential questions like, "Why does love sometimes make us do things we wouldn't normally do?" - I am imagining an "online Socratic Seminar." Combining the power of a weblog with the social learning of a Socratic Seminar would empower my students to become critical thinkers by letting them respond to essential questions while working in a social network with their classmates.
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I love your ideas for the poetry and Romeo & Juliet blogs. I think that these are two great units for online interaction and starting with them will help your students become more comfortable with the blogging process. Once you get to the Mockingbird unit, I think you may experience some student hesitation. Students are comfortable with responding to a prompt or initial blog, but starting their own blog will pose some creative difficulty for many students. Just a thought to consider. I would be really interested to hear how all the blogs go, please give me an update once you implement the blogs.
ReplyDeleteSounds like some very creative ideas that I may have to borrow when I get this blogging thing down. I agree that the students starting their own blogs will present a challenge and another could be your monitoring of each of them. Would this be more of a school/classroom blog site, or would it be open to the public? How would you prepare students for feedback and comments from other people, especially critical ones?
ReplyDeleteSillymongoose13, thanks for vote of confidence. I will keep you posted on what actually happens in the classroom. Since TKM is my last unit of the year, I am hoping to be well-versed enough by that time to broach this assignment. If not this year, perhaps next year. I have to admit that I am hesitant about trying any of this; however, my determination will win out, I'm sure.
ReplyDeleteFigspeaker - in response to your questions, I am not sure about public or private. I guess this is an area that I hope to find out more about as we progress through this course. Ideally, I'd like to present to the students that they will be writing for an audience much greater than just our classroom. Otherwise, what makes it much different than reading essays aloud in the classroom? I think having critical comments on the weblog would be an excellent eye-opener for my kids regarding their critical thinking skills, their writing skills, and more. However, I am thinking that this blog assignment will apply only to my college prep students and not my inclusion kids. Monitoring three classes will be much better than monitoring six! As far as preparing these kids for critical feedback, I might try to find (or create) some examples of critical feedback so students can see what it looks like and feels like. I briefly searched for ways of dealing with critical feedback on the web - there are some resources out there. Thank you for your comments - they gave me a lot to think about!
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