how I used blogs in my composition 2 class this semester
My class meets in a regular classroom, rather than a computer lab, but I arranged to have a laptop cart in class everyday (there were three days during the semester when we couldn’t have the laptop cart because another instructor had requested it). I had students create free blogs using wordpress on the first day of class. I created a class blogroll on the class blog.
I gave students ten minutes out of almost every class period to blog. Sometimes the blogging was at the beginning of class, sometimes in the middle, and sometimes at the end. One reason I didn’t want to make blogging always be at the same time is that I didn’t want any students showing up ten minutes late every time and missing the blogging, or leaving early every time and saying, “I’ll do the blogging on my own.”
I gave specific prompts connected to their research and writing processes. These are the topics for the blog prompts I used this semester:
- Day 1 – start blogs and post an introduction to yourself
- Day 2 – ten potential research topics
- Day 3 – potential research questions
- Days 4, 5 – critiquing sources
- Day 6 – summarize, paraphrase, and quote
- Day 7 – blog about a source and use parenthetical notes; group members check
- Day 8 – research methodologies
- Day 9 – ideas for primary research
- Day 10 – no blogging
- Days 11, 12 – blog about purpose, audience, context, and choices made by creator for genre pieces I brought in
- Day 13 - blog about your genre pieces
- Days 14, 15 – no blogging
- Days 16 - 28 – next actions on genre projects (my students create, workshop, and revise four genre pieces about their research topics during this time)
- Days 29 - 30 – blog in response to at least one presentation from class
I had originally wanted students to also post comments to classmates’ blogs, but once the semester got going, I felt that students were accomplishing what the comments would accomplish in class, so I told students that they could post comments but that there were no points associated with the comments. A few times during the semester, I gave students time in class to read and respond to classmates’ blogs.
I subscribed to all my students’ blogs through bloglines, which makes it fairly easy to read them and keep track of who’s blogging and who’s not. As far as grading goes, I made the blogs worth 15% of the course grade. To earn a B, blogs have to be complete and, for an A, blogs must be complete and, as I explain on the syllabus, “I should be able to tell that you have used your blog entries to challenge and stretch yourself as a researcher and writer (for example, your blog entries may be exceptionally detailed, specific, thoughtful, and probing).” The grading criteria are pretty soft, but still, there’s a wide range of grades students earn on the blogs.
What I like about the blogs is that they are a public record of a student’s thoughts about research and writing. Although I didn’t require that students read and comment on their classmates’ blogs, some did. Many students liked that they could access their blogs from any computer with an Internet connection to record thoughts and ideas or refresh their memory of something discussed in class.
blogarama
