I’m a high school teacher who is teaching an ELL Composition and Writing class. I was told about the Student Blogging Challenge by my principal. One of the big things in my classes is I want the learning experience to be as authentic as possible. I want students to feel like they’re doing something that’s useful, rather than just another assignment that’s required for a grade. I hoped that having a broader audience for their work would encourage them to put their heart into writing as I do.
Highlights: The topics for the student blogging challenge were very well chosen. They were quite broad for my application. Giving my students too many choices confuses them. But I could always find one or two topics that were intriguing. I would then present the one or two choices to my students, rather than the whole blog post. I particularly liked when we described our country. We made slideshow videos and the students recorded narration for them. Since most of the audience has never been to Taiwan, I thought they would find it interesting. The holidays also produced interesting posts, as Chinese cultural holidays are very different from western ones. We ended up writing Limericks for one, but I can’t remember if that was even part of the challenge. One of our students got a huge number of comments about his because it was featured. I really appreciate Kathleen featuring several of our posts, because it really attracted a lot more traffic and interest.
Comments and Interactions: I appreciate the effort at the start to teach the students to make good comments. As I mentioned, we got a bunch of hilarious comments about the limericks. Those were genuine. I did feel like a lot of the commenters were directed to do so by their teachers and didn’t really care about the blog. They would always post a link to their blog. I visited many of them, but I felt like it was just a plan to get more traffic. Most of those blogs were not of a high quality either.
Suggestions: I know that a lot of planning and work goes into this process. Kathleen and whoever else was involved did an excellent job keeping things organized.
I like the concept of class blogs, but I had a bit of trouble with those features on the website. The students who made their own blogs, were never properly added into my class. Other students were posting directly to my class blog, which is fine. I ended up linking in half the class and the other half were on my blog. I understand that Word Press is a well-respected platform, but I don’t really like the interface. I use it for my school’s website, and I don’t find it intuitive, even though I do a lot of tech stuff. Next time, I’ll use Google’s Blogger because it’s much easier to navigate and use. I spent a huge amount of time at the start of the semester teaching students to use the platform.
My other suggestion is for other teachers. It seemed like they didn’t really know how to help the students produce a quality blog. I understand that a lot of teachers have so many students in their classes that they can’t give constructive criticism and help, but a lot of the blogs I looked at were clearly done as an assignment and didn’t seem ready for a broader audience. I do understand the challenges teachers face, though, with time and resources.
Conclusion: Thank you to Kathleen and all the others who went out of their way to make this experience one of learning and fun. I think it’s a great idea and I’ll be doing it in the future if I’m teaching a class in this area of study. I believe that this is the direction we need to go in education, authentic learning opportunities with real-world skills and application.
