So...Blogs...

Apart from ellipses, blogs seem to be my new thing. Despite html being a language that (like French) I can almost read, but really can't approximate, I am really enjoying playing with this. I just finished a paper on using blogs in the "First-Year" Composition course I've been teaching these last two semesters. The paper itself wasn't that great I feel, but it was a good experience as far as reflecting on my teaching and the educational use of blogs.

My highly informal findings were:

a)like anything in the classroom using a blog to teach writing needs to be done in a very controlled and deliberate way

b)Those who, despite my lack of guidance and ill disguised inexperience with the technology, used the blogs as I had hoped they would, did get a lot of good writing practice and flexed some metacognitive muscles that weren't apparent in their early posts

c)a subtext to "b" whether the blogs were responsible for improvement or not they did at least provide a place where the student could see their improvement

d)oh yeah, and those who used comments got to see what I meant by "audience" in a more real life way.