Student blogging

Handwriting by djking 

What I found as a high school teacher is that many students (in my case mostly boys) detest writing reports. So when one group of students were working on creating their first film together and there was a need for individuals to document the process, I decided to try blogging instead of the usual log book. 

At first I was a bit worried that it would take a lot of time to show them how and get them started, but they understood the procedure and opened their blog accounts without any problems. Each week I would read what they had written and respond with my own comments. I liked that they had access to feedback so quickly.

Publishing what they wrote online seemed to affect the quality of what they wrote. Their texts were more reflective, not just reporting what they had done during the week, but even writing about problems that occurred and explanations for what they would need to think of during the week to come. 

The only drawback that I experienced was that some of the students had trouble remembering their passwords from one week to the next, or even which e-mail address they had used to open their accounts. So time that could have been spent writing was instead spent logging in to their blog. I had no way to help them with that. 

Now that I know about Voice Thread where students can record comments to a specific course, I would be tempted to try using that as an alternative to writing when they need to document their work.