Using Blogs in my Classroom

“Weblogs truly expand the walls of the classroom.” (Richardson, 2009) This is exactly what I want to do with and for my students. I don’t want learning to end just because the bell rings. When I was first beginning in the classroom, I thought students would just do this on their own. Boy was I wrong. True, there are the few who do. And that doesn’t mean that students are bad learners. They are just being teenagers. I have to come up with ways to keep things going after they leave my classroom. Blogging assignments can be one way I am able to do this.

One way I plan to begin using blogs with my English classes is to have my students blog as characters from the novel Battle of Jericho while we are reading it. I plan to have my students respond as characters from the novel to discuss why he/she (the character) wishes to join the Warriors of Distinction. I believe this will help to accomplish multiple goals. I want my students to comprehend the varied motivations for the different characters. It could be discussed in class, but I would like for my students to take on much of the interpretation by this point of the course. My students will gain better depth and understanding of the characters if they not only look into the characters on their own, but express this understanding by speaking or blogging as the character. This will also provide my students with an opportunity to gain insight from each other. As weblogs are a part of the World Wide Web for anyone to access (Richardson, 2009), each student will be able to read the blogs of his peers. A student might get something from another student that he didn’t get himself. It will be interesting to see the differences of interpretation here. This, too, should add to the learning for my students as they read their peers’ blogs.

Since virtually anyone can read blogs, I know that blogging will be a great way to showcase my students’ work. I am not quite yet sure how I want to utilize this. I am still working on this exactly. To my peers, I would like suggestions as to how you guys will be doing this with blogs in your curriculums.

As I become more confident and better at this, I know blogging will become one of those things that is just part of my class’s curriculum. I will probably be asking myself one day, “How did I teach and not do this?”


Reference: Richardson, Will. (2009). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Pr.