How I Might Use a Blog in My Classroom

The Principal and supervisors are always asking the teachers in every subject area at our school to add more writing assignments in our lesson plans. As I read The Second Edition; ‘Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms,” by Will Richardson, he list many classroom uses of weblogs. The one I like for my class is posting prompts for writing on weblogs. I teach at an urban school district in a city that was rank as one of the poorest in the country. I teach math, science and social studies to special education students. My students are always talking about what they download from the internet or what they said on MySpace. Out of the 12 students I have only 1 student doesn’t have a computer with internet access. But that one student has relatives living near him that does. As a homework assignment I could start simple and post on my classroom blog, a writing prompt about reflection of today’s lesson or open ended questions related to one of the lessons they had. I would give credit for just participating. Since each student posting will see every reply to the post, I will allow student to respond to each other. I could talk to other teachers in the school and combine classes and homework weblog writing prompt. Maybe kids in my school will one day deviate from MySpace and spend more time with each other on the homework writing prompt. One requirement is that web lingo can’t be used like “lol” or “btw.”