Blog Potpourri for the Future

For this week’s Five for the Future, a collection of thoughts:

1. My students and I have been frustrated by how often Blogger decides that their blogs are spam and locks them (one of mine suffered the same fate). Most of the students got their blogs unlocked when they sent the request, but some are still locked out after 3 or 4 days. I’ve been wondering what we need to do to prevent the blogs from being locked – more posts at the start? A certain kind of content or key words in the first couple of posts? As I’m typing this, I realize I should send this query to Blogger, so maybe I’ll do that when I’m done here.

2. Speaking of the students’ individual blogs, I have realized how ineffectively I handled these last year. I had students post things like reading logs, freewritings, and learning reflections on their personal blogs, and then I’d go comment and give them feedback. But the individual student and I were the only ones looking at their blogs. This year I want to have the students in my English 10 classes visit one another’s individual blogs and add their comments. My next step is to put the links to the individual blogs on the class blog. Pretty simple concept, but it took be a year to realize what I really needed to do. Guess paradigm shift can be a slow process.

3. Cheryl’s, Lary’s and my AP Lit students will soon be blogging their fingers off as we read Shakespeare’s King Henry IV, Part 1. They’ll be doing a reading blog on the class blogs and commenting on one another’s ideas. At some point they’ll be cross-blogging with the other classes. When I explained the assignment, some of them seemed a little daunted, but as many seemed interested and excited. We’ll see how it goes.