Real Students, Really Blogging!

We've been talking and discussing and questioning the integration of technology in our classrooms and how we might best utilize technology to get it into our students hands. This past week at my dyad, I observed students blogging!

These eighth graders were blogging up a storm by contributing to the classroom blog of student's book reflections. My cooperating teacher has them read books from different genres every quarter, and they write a reflection of the book after they are finished and post it to the blog. When looking for a new book, they can select a genre that they would like to read next, and can use the reviews from past students to give them an idea of whether or not they would like to choose that book.

I've been asking myself about students blogging in the classroom, and what would that look like? With little funding, would that be possible? In this instance, it seems to work really well. Students are blogging for a purpose and are writing about books that are important to them. In my opinion, blogging in this case is better than the alternative. Instead of writing for the teacher as audience, these blog contributors are writing for the audience of their peers. Instead of handing in a paper copy of a review to a teacher who would keep it, grade it, and return it, a whole community of readers and writers is being maintained by this blog. Pretty neat, if I do say so.