(For Teachers) Using a blog with students

Blogging lessons is easy and fun. I find it stimulates lateral thinking for me as a teacher.

Some suggestions

Indicate the level of the material

Engage interest by sourcing images for each post (very easy). Make them big. Be lateral in your choices.

Involve the students in the blog (use their material, post pictures of outings and activities)

When using student writing, do allow some errors to be published, highlight them and then add teacher corrections at the bottom. Give students pride in their writing by using online sourced pictures to enhance their text. Add comments, especially praise. Also, extend the material by turning student writing into practice exercises (scrambled sentences, gap fills etc.), or use it as the basis for discussion topics.

Make worksheets etc. to go with input material. Post these with answers when you have time.

Use your blog as a way of preparing a class. Make it on the blog, then cut and paste the material onto a paper worksheet if desirable.

Cut and paste, cut and paste, cut and paste... grab transcripts, questions, images. It's all just sitting there on the Net. Plonk it on the blog. Adapt the hell out of it!

NB: Some links can be unreliable – check them before using in class.

Add extension material. Encourage students follow up on input material they see in class. And do this yourself. On a theme or just a name that comes up, for example “Tom Waits”. The students might say, “Who is that?” So chuck on a post  with a song by Tom Waits, or film clip. Google the lyrics perhaps, write out some simple guiding questions - make it into an exercise that they do in class or on the iPad.

Supplement the textbook stuff. The references to cultural content made in the books is often not followed up much. Think of this as an invitation for the teacher to seek out that content and use it in class through the blog. I do this all the time. It’s so easy to do and it makes sense.

Make input on the blog a homework task. Make a Kahoot quiz for the post to use the next day.

Make a Kahoot for a series of posts (for example the ones you used for a particular unit). Offer a prize for a winning student or team? This encourages students to explore the input thoroughly over the week.

Finally, redate posts if you want to assemble them in a chunk for a particular lesson or week unit.Otherwise they are archived in chronological order.