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Student Blogging Ignite Presentation
1. Student Blogging
Presented by: Noel Drew
@DrewEdu
High school English and film teacher. #EdTech beginner and believer. #Literacy lover. #Reading
and #Writing in my classroom and across the curriculum. Married.
Salt Lake City, Utah – noeldrew.blogspot.com
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Noel Drew; JDCHS English TeacherPresenting about student blogging. I teach high school English but this is a strategy that works from Kindergartern-12th grade and across all content areas
My PLN made this possible.If you don’t have one, start building one now.
Writing is a struggle. Revamp, revise, research new practices every year. Across the board having students blog kept coming up as a common practice among the teachers that I respect the most and have effective writing instruction. It took me a long time, but I finally had to take the plunge and try it for myself.
I am a terrible audience for my students’ work.Authentic audience; create an audience. They see me as a boring old person that is not exciting to write for.
They write bets when they are experts in the subject area. They need to be able to CHOOSE. So often in school we ask them to write about things they don’t really understand photosynthesis, transubstantiation… Writing is a great way to learn, but their BEST writing comes when they know what they are talking about. Confidence.
It isn’t about the number or the letter. It’s about the FEEDBACK that we are giving to students. Do you give grades or do you give FEEDBACK. Feedback changes writing. Grades don’t.
They should be writing 4x as much as I grade. This is a stat from Kelley Gallagher. So often we get bogged down in grading so we stop assigning writing assignments.
My writing instruction needs to be differentiated. Some students are ready to write 10 page research papers and others struggle to write a cohesive paragraph.
5 tenants about teaching writing that I believe to be true that are all covered by blogging.
First my students read and analyzed blogs. I created a list of blogs that our faculty reads. Looked at form, audience purpose, and tone.
This helped us brainstorm our own ideas for our blogs. Students can work collaboratively or alone. This is the list of all of the sophomores blogs.
Next up you will see lots of pictures of my students blogs that I am so proud of.Books anonymous reviews books. Even has a twitter feed to promote their bog. And they are pursuing local authors to interview.
Students have 30 minutes a week to either write their blog or read each others blogs.
Promotes community. Students leave postive comments and feeback for each other.
Never seen students do so much work above and beyond the assignment before.
Sometimes I read them; sometimes a grade them. IT can be participation or a writing grade. They never know. Keeps them on their toes.