Ideas for Using Blogs in Your Classroom

Using Blogs to Provide Information to the School Community

You can start a class blog to...
• post class-related information such as calendars, classroom events, homework assignments and other important class information.
• communicate with parents and invite their comments.
• post photos of class activities.
• invite student comments or postings on issues.
• publish examples of good student writing done in class.
• exhibit student art, poetry, and other written work.
• build a class newsletter, using student-written articles and photos they take.

Using Blogs to Enhance Student Learning

You can create a classroom blog entirely for student learning. You can use the comment feature to...
• assess student learning by posting writing prompts and having students respond.
• post photos and have students respond to them.
• gather and organize Internet resources for a specific subject, providing links to appropriate sites in a blog entry.
• post tasks to carry out project-based learning tasks with students.
• create a parent/child blog with writing prompts for parents to work on with their children.
• complete project work in small groups, assigning each group a different task.
* provide online readings for your students to read and react to.

Students can create their own blogs to...
• post their own ideas, reactions and written work.
• post their reactions to writing prompts.
• react to photos you post.
• keep a journal for class.
• keep a learning log for class.
• write about their ideas and opinions about topics discussed in class.
• keep a digital portfolio of their work.
• write comments, opinions, or questions on daily news items or issues of interest.
• showcase their best work.

Informal Professional Development

You can create a blog to grow professionally. Use your blog to...
• reflect on teaching experiences.
• write a description of a particular teaching unit.
• save links for later use.
• collaborate with other teachers.
• describe what worked during a lesson and what didn’t.
• provide teaching tips for other teachers.
• write about something you learned from another teacher.
• explore important teaching and learning issues.

You can also read the blogs of other educators to...
• get teaching tips.
• learn about the content area that you teach.
• find out about professional development opportunities.
• get information on new learning technologies.
• learn about teaching and learning issues.
• collaborate with other teachers.

Other Ideas

Week in Review
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! Soon you will have students begging to write the summaries.

No need to miss out
Those who are at home due to illness will not feel as disconnected from their classroom, a great boon during flu season!

Find the Facts
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.

Critique a site
Post a link to a web site related to a topic you 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?

Comment on current events
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.

Write a sports story
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).

Report on a vacation or long weekend
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.

Role-play a point of view
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 or 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.

“Meet” during snow days and unexpected days off
If you teach in an area of the world that is prone to sudden days off due to inclement weather, make a deal with your students that they will earn extra credit for posting to the blog on such days. As soon as you find out that you have the day off, go on the class blog as a teacher and post a prompt, even something as simple as “What unexpected surprises did you have this snow day?” After they come in from playing in the snow, they’ll love having something else to do. Note: for those without Internet access at home, allow them to WRITE on paper for extra credit and help them find time at school to post, so they do not feel left out.

Report on a field trip or virtual field trip
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.

Write a neighborhood or community tour with pictures
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.

Bounce around a hot topic
Middle-schoolers always have an exaggerated sense of what is “fair.” Use their strong opinions to spark dialog on your blog. Should backpacks be allowed in class? Are the required gym uniforms fair? Listen for hot topics, then use them to develop logical thinking and writing with support for your opinions. High schoolers can take this even further by discussing topics outside their immediate surroundings.

Make a “suggestion box” blog
Invite students to contribute ideas to make the classroom a better place or make it a better course.

Question blog
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!

Study hint blog
Give extra credit for study hints posted before a test or quiz.

Fitness blog
Encourage students to post ideas for healthy eating and exercise. They can tell how far they ran or what healthy options they have found in the cafeteria.

Organization tips
Invite students to share tips for how they stay organized, not just for school, but for life. Maybe parents can contribute too: “I always put a post-it note on my steering wheel to remember to drop off DVDs at the rental place.” Seeing how others stay organized really helps the more scatter-brained folks who never thought of these ideas. Ask some teachers and others in the school to contribute, too -- maybe even the principal. Learning support and ADHD students would really benefit from this one.

Recipes for success
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.

Recipes—for real
As you study fractions, world languages, or different cultures, nothing is more popular than using recipes. Have your students share one on the class blog then comment if they try one that another student posted.

Blog Ice Breaker
This is especially effective near the start of the school year. Use student-selected pseudonyms to register your student users (they must tell only you what their secret identity is) and allow them to comment outside of class on hot topics from class discussion for a few weeks. After a few weeks, ask in class if anyone thinks they know who the others REALLY are and if they can match all pseudonyms to actual classmates. This is a great way to allow even the shyest people to comment without fear to start the year and to find out which quiet, non-participants in class are quite vocal at a computer. Your students will know each other far better, creating a greater sense of classroom community.

Four Images
As a first blog entry to allow students to get to know both each other and the blogging tool, use an adaptation of this idea from high school math teacher Dan Meyer. Ask each student to use four images to describe himself/herself and explain how those images define who they are.

Lab research collaboration
In a high school science class, encourage students to share lab data they found and collaborate in writing up lab reports on the class blog. You can require lab report format, but other lab partners can read and comment on reports they feel are great (or lacking). This also allows students to se the variety of data collected from the class. Even if you only require one “blogged” lab report a marking period, the process will make a difference.

Continuing Stories
Start a blog story (set up the setting, characters, and initial situation in an opening paragraph) and let each student who visits comment by adding a sentence or two. If someone gets unruly or ridiculous, the other authors will quickly comment to that effect! You can make the story support curriculum, too. For example, the story could be “historical fiction” about a family during the Civil War or baby geese that are migrating.

Continuing Vocabulary
Start a blog story at the beginning of the year as you begin vocabulary in your English class. Each week, require students to add to the story, using a logical sentence that both fits the story and uses one of that week’s vocab words. The stories will become lengthy and outrageous as the year goes on, but the kids will be re-reading the words over and over to reinforce them -- and laughing as they do! They will NEVER forget those words!