Creative Blogging
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Many teachers are taking advantage of modern technology and utillising media such as twitter and blogging to enhance their teaching and finding other ways in which to share good practice and connect with their students.
However, more and more schools are encouraging pupils to write their own blogs or contribute to an ongoing classroom blog.
Encouraging students to blog has numerous advantages. Student blogging makes learning independent and makes learning demand orientated and focuses purely on the pupil. A recent BBC article (which can be found here) highlighted how a primary school in Bolton has utilised blogging which has led to not only an increase in making writing ‘cool’ for boys’ but has also improved the schools results almost ‘seven fold’.
The reason I’m writing this blog is due to an inset session I had on Friday about encouraging students to blog and how one department is encouraging students to blog by being using a varierty of creative methods. The one which literally blew me away was the departments ‘character blogs’. Character blogs are so simple and can be utilised for almost any subject and any year group. Character blogs are a type of blog written as though a famous character, rather than an actual person, is making the blog post. The famous character can be someone related to the topic being studied or just a character related to the subject. The character needn’t even be famous. For example, when students are studying Ancient Egypt students can be encouraged to write a blog as if it is an Egyptian writing the blog rather than themselves. This encourages students to find out more about the topic and thus deepens learning. In Geography, students could write a weekly weather blog in the style of a weather presenter. In History students could write a blog as if they are are a person living through the Black Death. The possibilities are endless.
Most schools today have a VLE which allows students to blog, but even without that, there are lots of free blogging websites that can be used to encourage students to blog.
Why not give this a go…..........
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