All year, 8th graders have been mixing up their writing assignments by blogging on their own online blog. All ELA classes have set up blogs, instead of using writer’s notebooks for the entire year. Students have the option to blog about what they want for their weekly writing assignments. Some blog topics include Netflix reviews, artwork showcases, and many other topics that spark the students’ interests.

Mrs. Martin, an 8th grade Language Arts teacher came up with the idea instead of doing writer’s notebook assignments. “I always wanted to do blogs instead of notebooks because I love using technology. I started a blog to see if it was easy or not, determined it was, and decided to just dive in and try it. I had a feeling kids would like it better than their notebooks and I think that has proven true,” she said. “Blogging is easier to grade than carrying 120 composition books around, which I actually used to do! So I love it from a convenience standpoint.  Also, I don’t have to worry about a ton of kids saying they forgot their notebook or it’s in their locker. Our writing is in the cloud and we have constant access to it,” Martin said. “ I don’t want to discourage teachers from blogging– those were entirely iPad related problems. I’d go next door and Mrs. De Los Santos’ kids were typing away on their blogs using Chromebooks while we were dead in the water. iPads are cool and slick and fun, but they are not multi user devices and the district is still learning how to manage them.  All the ‘cons’ of blogging for me this year are really the cons of using iPads!” she added.

Most students in her class use WordPress, a professional software that is used for blogs and website making. “My WordPress blog is actually my third blog.  The first two are Blogger™ blogs. WordPress is about a billion times more attractive. That was the initial draw for me. Our blogs look legit because of all their professional templates and more current font and design elements.  Blogger looks like web 1.0 next to WordPress.  As I started playing around with WordPress over the summer in preparation for this school year, I discovered that if you combine all other blogging platform users and compare them to WordPress, WordPress still has more users! I think that makes WordPress design ability a good tech literacy skill to teach my students.  Who knows, it might be something you put on your resume someday!” Martin said. Eventually, the entire school will be trashing their writer’s notebooks, and will pick up an iPad to begin writing their next piece to share with friends through the cloud.