Weblogs and Their Effects on Writing Skills
Case study of blogs used with fifth graders to improve writing skills. In both classes reviewed, blogs improved "both rich content and author's craft" but not grammar and spelling.
Collaborative Blogging as a Means to Develop Elementary Expository Writing Skills
Study on collaborative blogging with third graders that resulted in improved attitudes towards writing, improved quality of writing, and a number of unintended benefits
Using threaded comments to build a writing community in your classroom | Reflections on Teaching
A 6th grade teacher talks about the advantage of threaded blog comments for building a writing community. This encourages much more of students talking to each other and makes it easier to follow blog conversations.
One of those is threaded comments. This is rapidly bringing my blogs to the level I had always hoped to acheive–one where the students are talking to each other and not just talking to me.
Blogging as Reflective Practice | Adventures in Corporate Education
Thoughts on blogging as reflective practice for learning, with benefits in both the activity of writing and the social connections
So basically when you blog, you have to think about what you have read, how that compares to what you already know or what you have experienced, and that comparison helps you to construct new mental models that you articulate in written form (your blog).
Why I Blog - The Atlantic (November 2008)
Andrew Sullivan on the value of blogging and how blogging differs from traditional print journalism.
It is accountable in immediate and unavoidable ways to readers and other bloggers, and linked via hypertext to continuously multiplying references and sources. Unlike any single piece of print journalism, its borders are extremely porous and its truth inherently transitory.
Logs require a letting-go of narrative because they do not allow for a knowledge of the ending. So they have plot as well as dramatic irony—the reader will know the ending before the writer did.
A novelist can spend months or years before committing words to the world. For bloggers, the deadline is always now. Blogging is therefore to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.
Avoiding the 5 Most Common Mistakes in Using Blogs with Students
The 5 mistakes outlined in this article are
- "Ineffective contextualization" (not thinking about the best way to use blogs, usually self-reflection)
- "Unclear Learning Outcomes"
- "Misuse of the environment" (treating blogs like wikis or discussion forums)
- "Illusive grading practices" (lacking clear rubrics)
- "Inadequate time allocation" (both for students to write and instructors to grade and give feedback)
Blogging and Reading Comprehension Strategies « Classroom Tech Tips
Applying reading comprehension strategies (questioning, making connections, inferring, etc.) and tips for students to improve blog conversations. One of the suggestions is to have a class focus together on one strategy in their comments to each other. I can see how the sentence frames would be very helpful, especially for younger writers.
Top News - Blogging helps encourage teen writing
Survey results about teens and writing, showing that students who blog write more for personal reasons and are more likely to think writing skills are essential. Most students think their writing would improve if they could use more technology to practice writing for school.
Forty-seven percent of teen bloggers write outside of school for personal reasons several times a week or more, compared with 33 percent of teens without blogs. Sixty-five percent of teen bloggers believe that writing is essential to later success in life; 53 percent of non-bloggers say the same thing.
Most students (82 percent) believe that additional instruction and focus on writing in school would help improve their writing even further--and more than three-quarters of those surveyed (78 percent) think it would help their writing if their teachers used computer-based writing tools such as games, multimedia, or writing software programs or web sites during class.
» Thinking ’bout Linking Bud the Teacher
Reflections on how writing for online is different than writing for text. How do we teach connective writing that uses the full potential of what real blogging can be, as opposed to just "writing with blogs"?
7 Days to Rediscovering Your Blogging Groove