Blogging Plan

My blogging plan for September and October will deal with the students in the Academically Talented Program (ATP) which consists of approximately 50 students. Students will each create their own blog using a platform agreed upon by the ATP teacher, though I will suggest edublogs.

The types of posts will actually be the same each time because this will all be based on a new program at our school, Reader’s Workshop. Each teacher is allowed to run Reader’s Workshop the way they would like and ATP will be using blogging. Each student will have their own blog which they will post on one day each week, during the same class period as well as being responsible for following 4 other students throughout the remainder of the week.

Student posts will be an update of what they have been reading. They are not allowed to give away the endings to any books they are reading but rather are writing about how their reading is going and can write based on prompts such as “what has surprised you about the story?” or “what do you think is going to happen next?” or they can simply write how they are feeling about the story or their favorite part.

In order to comment on others, students will be put into groups of 5 and will be responsible for commenting on the other 4 students in their group at least one day per week. Student groups will change every semester so that students will get the chance to comment on 16 other students throughout the year. Aside from improving their reading and writing skills they will be reading about various books that other students are reading which will perhaps give them ideas for what they might like to read in the future.

Students will also create Feedly accounts to make it easier for them to see when the other students in their group have added comments to their blogs.

Students will have class time to create their own posts but not necessarily to comment on other students’ blogs, but they can access their blogs from home and work throughout the week.