Blogging and Wikis

I found the Blogging and New Literacies chapter to be very accurate in my experience. As I've told all of you before, my son has a blog. He started the blog because he hated doing the regular English assignments his senior year English teacher gave him. Luckily for him, his teacher wanted to do everything she could to get him writing. She offered him, and others in his class, the opportunity to write in an online blog. They were never given a specific assignment for the blog but the students were to set their blog up so that after each entry an e-mail would be sent directly to the teacher so she would know about the entry, read, and respond to it.

My son found the blog to be a useful tool for him to share what he wanted to share. As his mother, there were and are things in his blog that I don't really like to read but it's his blog and not mine. He shared more than he should have at times but has removed some of the content that his teacher or I found to be too revealing. Most of his followers are his friends or family and he generally gets encouraging comments. I had hoped he would continue with his blog after graduation but as of yet, he has not. But, he has not taken it down and I fully expect him to use it again in the near future.

Although many of you will think I'm crazy for sharing it, click here to see his blog.

This is what an unmotivated, railing against the system, student can produce when given the freedom to write what they want to write about. Take a look at Big Sky, Feb 1 post and many of the others and keep in mind that not one of these entries was a class assignment. He just wrote when he wanted to and got credit for writing by his English teacher.

I'm so thankful to her for giving him this outlet.

Enjoy.

Blogging in the classroom

The sixth grade class in which I am completing my internship often uses blogs. We use them to discuss the books they are reading and to share news about the class. Originally, we used a website that allowed the teacher to manage all of the blogs and passwords for a group of users. We found it to be very difficult and have decided to use the blog feature of blackboard. The kids love blogging. They sometimes do have difficulty getting access to computers though so we have to work a lot of computer lab time into our week.