Teaching how to use student blogs as a way of communication

Introduction

Start of the new year and lots to do. To get to know your class and your students, to establish codes of collaboration in class, class visions and how to behave in class. In addition, we have the temptations of using the internet and connecting with classmates and friends. This can be easily avoided if we close the internet and collect the mobile phones, but that is not the environment I am looking for. Using a mobile phone hotel is okay most of the time because the students can collect their phones when they need them to make videos for instance. But today lets start by setting up a blog for the students, and if we have time we can create a twitter account too.

am also enclosing a blogging rubric that you can show your students to explain what we are looking for in their writing.

Lesson plan

1. Set up your own blog. You can choose between WordPress or blogger.com. Or any other provider you might find.
2. Be sure to make a good name for the blog and don’t use your name
3. Find a good theme and a good headline. You can look at the blogs listed here to the right to get some good ideas.
4. Before you start writing, use Google Chrome as your browser and install Grammarly to correct your spelling.
5. On your first post, you should write about your expectations for this year and how you hope we will work in English class this year.
6. Register for a clustrMap and connect it to your blog.
7. Be sure to add your blog stats, you will find those as a widget.
8. Create a Twitter account (if you already have one use it), follow the rest of the class on Twitter.
9. Link your Twitter account to your blog making it click-able for those who want to follow you, use a Twitter image or text.
10. Share your post on Twitter.