Blogging can be a powerful tool when it comes to student performance and motivation.

Just think about it, you assign a book to read, and you set up several activities to asses your students. Some of this assesment deals with traditional question and answering through the approach of a book report/direct questioning and answers, traditional testing.
Why not let them blog about it?
Often times teachers are afraid that by allowing students to blog about something, they will be unfocused or are being misdirected, which in reality, it is quite the oppostie proven by lengthy research. Yes, you have to have a plan of attack, including focused questions and a proper design in what you want to get accomplished within your blog. But, the fact is students often times will give you much more than you ask for when it comes to blogging on the topic of a book and they love it!

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Comment by Monica Brown on March 4, 2009 at 12:18pm: Having students blog sounds like a wonderful idea! I'm a tech curriculum facilitator and just started blogging myself. I've thought about encouraging some of our teachers to give our students projects where they blog. I'm not quite sure yet though, whether to go with a open site, such a blogger.com or a site that can more easily be monitored by the teacher. Have you had your students blog yet? What site are you using?

Thanks,
Monica

Comment by Wayne Lawson on March 4, 2009 at 12:43pm: We are going to introduce this concept/lesson design to our english/literature department first and try to hook them. I honestly haven't decided what would be the best web based blogger to use in the classroom. I am actually open to anyone who has a more informed opinion. Anyone have any suggestions for what web based blogger is best for the classroom environment?

Comment by Peter Lane on March 4, 2009 at 9:03pm: I have used both specific questions and open-ended questions with my middle school remedial reading classes. I used to tell them that they had to write at least two sentences -- and I got exactly that! When I took the shackles off and told them to simply answer my prompts I began to get multiple sentences and even paragraphs. You can see how I have used the my blog to assist student learning at Mr. Lane's Effective Reading Blog.

Comment by Wayne Lawson on March 6, 2009 at 1:19pm: Mr. Lane,
Do you have all your students open up accounts to access your blog? Or can the access without having an account?

Comment by Peter Lane on March 6, 2009 at 9:16pm: Anyone can access the blog and submit comments without having an Edublog account or an e-mail address.

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