How to Get Started? Five Blogging Ideas

Here are some ideas for how to use blogging with your students:

1. Ask students to describe their search activities, including both their challenges and their successes, to find a short-list of bloggers they want to follow. Have them post a number of short posts that describe the blogs, the focus, the topics, what they like and don’t like, and why they selected them over others. Have them include a brief comparison between three different blogs, and have them rate them, and choose two of the three, explaining their reasons for their choices.

2. Have students summarize and critique blog posts and share their summaries with others (or, for private bloggers, have them blog for themselves).

3. Initiate a discussion between students about how to summarize, what should be included, and how much the summaries should be worth. Based on student input, come up with a student blog summary checklist students can use to self-assess their own work before committing it to final marking.

4. Suggest that students post something about a vacation they have had, or an interesting event they attended, and get them to include a couple photos with their descriptions, and (optional) record a short audio clip. You would need to model this activity and describe the steps you took yourself, pointing out tips and give encouraging words.

5. Get students to post fuzzy drafts of disconnected ideas, and get them to link their commentary and analysis to online resources such as blog posts (one’s own or others), podcasts, videos, web pages, articles, photos, etc.

These five basic ideas are an excellent starting point to get students interested in blogging.