Why Blog?

I am not the first English teacher to turn to blogging in the classroom. In fact, just the other day I noticed a post on the TESOL blog about this very topic. But since this may be a big change for many of my English 1101 students, I owe everyone an explanation about why we will be writing and sharing our essays on our own personal (and public) blogs this semester rather than just submitting them through the class's course management website Desire2Learn.

My primary motivation for blogging is to give students an authentic audience for their writing. On the first day of class several semesters ago, when completing an activity called "We write because...," several students suggested that writing is a resource for other readers and writers. That is exactly spot on--or at least it should be spot on. Unfortunately, this is often not the case. Student writing is frequently submitted only to an instructor for a grade and never seen by anyone else. This means that it rarely lives up to its potential of being a resource for others. In this class, however, student blog posts will be seen and read, at the very least, by classmates. If a post is particularly compelling, a student might choose to share it beyond our classroom, through a social media platform, for example.

"Audience"

Another reason I want my students to blog in the English classroom is to develop their digital literacy skills. Most writing today is written to be shared through a screen rather than on a piece of paper. And it is the rare screen that makes use of written text as its only mode of communication. I want students to incorporate a variety of communicative modes--pictures, videos, and hyperlinks--as meaning-making tools. This is the type of communication they will be asked to do throughout their college and professional careers, and the composition classroom is a good place to start learning how to do this if students haven't already done so.

Perhaps most importantly, blogging has the potential to increase motivation and help students become better writers. Writing for an audience and having the opportunity to craft artful posts are just plain motivating and fun. When students know their writing will be read by others, and when they begin to enjoy the writing process, my hope is that they will care more about doing it well. This care will hopefully lead to detailed attention to language--yes, the dreaded grammar element of writing--and the words--or vocabulary--that are used to create meaning.

So as we begin this new semester of English 1101, it is my hope that all of the writers in my classroom--and yes, we are all writers, will enjoy the blogging experience and all it entails. To help us get started, please read the document I created in D2L that explains the basics of blogging and how to set up a new blog in Blogger. You can also watch the YouTube tutorial below for more detailed guidance.