Pretty Awesome

Blogs are a terrific way to get students engaged in writing in all disciplines of education. I took a World History course this past summer and the teacher used a blog to get us to write reflections about our weekly readings. We were also encouraged to comment on other classmates blogs. This was the first time I had done this and I felt myself really thinking about what I wrote; I definitely felt the peer pressure to sound intelligent and well-read.

I used to work as a para-educator in a 5th grade classroom and a couple of teachers in the 5th grade used blogs to encourage nightly writing from their students. Interestingly enough, the teacher that assigned a "free-write" had more students participating on a regular basis; though for some students, writing about a specific topic was easiest because they did not have to stress about finding the "right" topic to write about on their blogs.