Student blog example

Blogging can address multiple Common Core standards, it holds students accountable while minimizing stress, it can bestructured enough to provide clarity while giving freedom to experiment, and be varied enough to keep students engaged.

Blogging allows  students to write for multiple purposes:

Open Reflection - by allowing our students to openly reflect, we do not only see what they learn, but they can learn from each other as well.

Developing Literacy with Different Mediums – blogging is a great way to write and share ideas, but there are many other ways that students can share content through this platform.  Using a site likeSoundCloud can give students an easy opportunity to share their actual voice with the world. YouTube is an obvious one, but even presentations through SlideShare are helpful to tell stories in many different ways.  The nice thing about a blog is that basically anything with an embed code can be placed into that space.  This gives many different opportunities for students to share their voice while becoming fluent in “21st century literacies“.

Student Voice – building upon the last point, giving students a space to share their voice is extremely important.  Blogging should not only be “school related” but “learning related”.  In a blog, you may learn a lot about not only what students are learning in school, but what they are passionate about and hopefully how we could serve them better as educators. 

Creating an Open Archive of Learning - through a blog, you are able to look more in depth into what has been learnt and if you tag and categorize it properly, you can easily be able to google your own work, as can anyone else. The opportunity to search that this medium provides makes it a lot easier to go back and revisit what has been learnet in the past, as opposed to flipping through notebook after notebook, trying to find something extremely specific.

Developing a Positive Digital Footprint - Students should be able to positively google their name after leaving school.