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Students in Mr. R’s English class will be using personal weblogs to post various reflective journals, diary style entries (For the Anne Frank unit), and a variety of other writing assignments to the Internet. This project is part of the technology integration initiative in the middle school. Our class will be working closely with the middle school IT teacher, to utilize technology within the context of our English curriculum throughout the year. I also hope the idea of being “published” will motivate the students to not only write more often, but to write more effectively.

Our first activity will be posting our first quarter reflective journals which deal with the students understanding of the ESLRs in relation to the reading of, class participation in, and completion of projects with Lord of the Flies. They have been working very hard on these projects, and I can think of no better way for you to share their enthusiasm, than to read the work and comment on it yourself. Hence, the magic of the blog!

A weblog, or blog as they are commonly called, is a special type of web page that can be created and easily updated using a web browser. Each new entry has its own date stamp. Each entry has a comments section where visitors to the blog may leave comments for the author.

How it Works

Each student has their own blog. You can find the links on the right hand side of this page This website is dedicated to educational use only and has been created specifically for student users.

Instead of handing in extended writing assignments as hard copies which are often only read by the teacher, students will post all of their writing on their blogs to be read by a wider audience. Having a real audience is one of the key components to this program. In addition to receiving comments from their classmate and teacher, students will receive comments from other classes who visit their blogs. Parents are also invited to visit and respond. Potentially, anyone on the Internet could respond to our blogs, however, it is not likely that the world at large will stumble across them.

These blogs will not only give the students the opportunity to share their work with a wide audience, but we will be working on establishing a constructive community of writers who will comment on each others work, in order to help create confident, articulate, and effective writers. Students will need to work on their blog outside of class. All that is required is an Internet connection and a web browser. Students may also utilize the library and the computer labs before and after school. Students are able to save their work as drafts before publishing it to their blog.

Security

As part of this blogging initiative students will learn how to effectively utilize this new medium. In addition they will be introduced to the advantages and disadvantages of interacting with global audiences. In order to increase security, the only personally identifying information included in the blog will be their first name followed by the first letter of their surname. There will be no mention of our school name or our location. Students are allowed to post their interests and opinions, but not their age, email address, photographs of themselves, or other sensitive information.

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