Reading and Writing with Blogs

"Perhaps that most significant instructional potential of blogs is student engagement." (Bull and Kajder, 2003, 35)

Glen Bull and Sarah Kajder wrote an article for Leading and Learning with Technology that explores how blogging can be used to scaffold struggling readers and writers. While the article is aimed towards blogging with struggling students, the benefits and activities discussed can be applied to any students in any classroom.

The article argues that by providing a multi-genre, multimedia workspace blogs can engage students in writing in ways that paper and pens cannot (Bull and Kajder, 2003). The article lists that following benefits of blogging:

• Economy - blog entries must be written well to be concise and readable by the viewer.
• Archiving - the archiving of the blog entries allows students and viewers to see the progression of thought and progress
• Feedback - viewers provide feedback for student work; the audience is authentic and, thus, motivates the students
• Multimedia - students can post various types of work to blogs - text, links, photos, digital stories, music, artwork - the possibilities are endless
• Immediacy - the publishing of the entry is immediate and the students see the outcome of their work
• Active Participation- not only is the student participating on their blog but they can also leave comments on their peers' blogs and participate in the larger blogging community (Bull and Kajder, 2003)

In addition to listing the benefits of blogging, the article goes on to discuss potential uses for blogs in the classroom. While it discuss many different activities that span many subjects, the activities that interested me the most were:

• Exploding Sentences - students revise sentences from previous posts (theirs and their classmates) and add rich descriptive words and details. I think this is a great writing activity that helps teach vocabulary and complex sentence structure.
• Literature Circle Discussions - takes the in class literature circle discussions and continues them in the blogsaphere. This activity would give students more time to discuss books and their characters. It would also allow for the potential for literature circle to span beyond the classroom to include multiple classes at multiple schools.
• Photoblogs - students writing captions for photographs. This would be a great way to incorporate art and photography in the language arts classroom. In addtion, it lets students practice summarizing and capturing thoughts into concise sentences.

While I though this article gave some great benefits and ideas for blogging in the classroom, I would have liked links to examples of the activities being used in the classroom. This would have given me a better idea of the acticity and a person to connect with to ask questions and find out more information on specific activities.

References:

Bull, G. and Kajder, S. (2003). Scaffolding for struggling students: Reading and writing with blogs. Leading and Learning with Technology, 31(2). Retrieved from http://itlab.coe.wayne.edu/jalshaibani/docs/reading%20writing%20blogs.pdf