How can I use blogging in my classroom?

Here are some ideas on how you can use a classroom blog...
(courtesy of Blog Basics for the Classroom)

• Put a biweekly writing prompt up on your blog and have your students respond to it by a certain day.  If you use the approval process before allowing student responses to show, you can skim posts to be sure there is nothing cruel or inappropriate. Invite parents to comment back to their elementary children.
• Appoint a weekly blog team in your elementary classroom to write that week’s blog entry, describing the events of the week in Room XYZ. Invite moms and dads to comment and watch the excitement grow!
• Practice good reading strategies and check comprehension by asking students to respond to an assigned reading, reflecting on how it applies to their own experience.
• Post a statement with no supporting facts. Ask students to find facts to support or refute the opinion, using links to reliable web sites and their own persuasive explanations. This could work well for environmental issues, political issues, or any topic that is debatable.
• Post a link to a web site related to a topic your are studying and invite students to give their personal evaluation: Does the site show bias? Does it seem well-researched? Is it a reliable source?
• Post a link to a current events story and ask students to comment on its implications in your local community or their own lives. Even young students can respond to stories from the local paper’s online pages.  
• Have students write a newspaper-style sports account of their own soccer game or swim meet. Be sure that they do not use full names of any participants. Initials work best (this is a good place for a mini-lesson on Internet safety). Or they could write up actual school teams, but that is not as personal. Encourage them to read and comment to each other or to invite parents to comment (younger students).
• When returning from a break, ask students to write a blog entry from the point of view of the family dog on their weekend trip or even as the duffle bag/suitcase  they packed and took along. Always encourage commenting on other’s stories.
• Any time a student is absent on an “educational trip,” i.e. the family pulls the kids out to go away, require regular blog postings from the trip or as soon as they return, telling about the things on the trip that connect to what they have been learning in the classroom. Ex. What biomes did you visit? What predators and prey did you see? If they are creative, encourage them to write from a different point of view, such as the castle at Disney seeing all these people arriving.
• Have students write a blog entry from a different angle. Have them write as an inanimate object, such as an igneous rock when you are studying types of rock. Choose curriculum-related people of objects and assign a specific thing they must talk about, preferably something that will prompt a heated opinion and require that they demonstrate understanding of curriculum, as well. Ex You are a colonist, and you just found out that they are going to tax your tea.
• Have students act as reporters telling about a field trip or special event. They can pretend to have interviewed a cow at the farm they visited or be straightforward in reporting the real events of the trip. Students could also write up a virtual field trip they took online in class.
• As a culmination of a unit on your community or local history  create a neighborhood or community tour blog. Each student (or pair) can take and upload a picture and tell about it. Then invite others in the school or parents to make comments about their favorite locations. Be sure that you do not include any picture of students, for safety’s sake.
• Invite students to contribute ideas to make our classroom a better place or make this a better course.
• Invite students to submit a question about course content, related ideas, or “I have always wondered” in advance of starting a new unit. Asking everyone to express one curiosity before starting the unit will give you a place to focus and make the content more meaningful to them. This idea is sort of an electronic KWL Chart!
• At the end of a unit, a marking period, or even  school year, have students write “recipes for success” in that unit, class, etc. These can remain for others to try in the future. Encourage actual recipe format, including ingredients and procedure.

Please let me know if you ever want your students to respond to a blog post during their computer time!  I am always happy to integrate what you are doing in the classroom into our computer lab time!