Thursday, August 1, 2019

On Blogging with Students #exploringidentity

My Writing Wednesdays posts are inspired by my friend Katherine Sokolowski who blogs at Read, Write, Reflect. She's a middle school teacher who writes too!

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Blogging has been an awesome addition to my life so I’m excited to share it with students! I first started our family blog in 2008 and then shifted to blogging about teaching in 2010 so it's a big part of my identity.

What I love most about blogging is that it's short and sweet. I try to keep my blog posts to the point but the writing process is also short when I blog. I spend time on my posts but I go through the process and publish what I’ve written fairly quickly (especially compared to traditional publishing!). 

I love that I can add a picture or a video and I can link to other ideas. And I really love that I have a cool artifact with all my thoughts in one place. It’s a unique sort of digital scrapbook that allows me to share my life with others. 

This year I’ll be sharing some sort of short text with students, either a photo, video, poem, or article. We’ll use these texts to practice visual thinking strategies, making connections, asking questions. Then students will think critically, discuss and maybe do some research, and respond by blogging. They'll have a choice to pick what they want to respond to from the week. Because blogging is meant to be short...both in length and turn around, I’m hoping this will be a place for students to explore ideas and experience publishing on a consistent basis. 

I’ll be looking for thoughtful content and for students to practice including different media in their responses but I won’t be grading their blogs. To start, I'm going to use Seesaw for the first trimester so they'll have a sheltered audience and then we'll discuss and decide if it's working for them or not. 

Shout out to Pernille Ripp and Tricia Ebarvia for sharing their thoughts on blogging with students and helping me plan for blogging with my students! Do you blog with students or have thoughts on giving students the opportunity to blog? I'd love to hear about it!

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