Teaching and Learning Language through Blogs

1. In my own teaching, I would use blogs as a tool to provide my students with written feedback on their writing. I would also require my students to use blogs to provide written feedback on the writing of their peers. Giving and receiving feedback is a crucial part of the writing process. As an online community of learners, blogs are an excellent format for students to become comfortable with giving and accepting feedback for the purpose of improving their own writing and the writing of their peers. 

College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards for Writing

Standard 6: Use technology, including the internet, to produce and publish writing and to interact and collaborate with others.

2. As a future ESL teacher, blogs would allow me to facilitate cultural awareness and understanding among my students. Since many ESL classrooms contain students from a wide variety of cultural and linguistic backgrounds, it is important that ESL teachers cultivate a sense of cultural sensitivity and appreciation among their students. Students can research topics related to their own culture or foreign cultures. They can post links to articles, pictures, videos, music, and even provide their own commentary on the cuisine, everyday life, and traditions of a particular culture. Through the sharing of information and ideas, teachers and students can use blogs to promote cultural awareness in a multiculturally diverse classroom setting.

College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards for Writing, Grades 9-10

Standard 7: Conduct short as well as more sustained research projects to answer a question (including a self-generated question) or solve a problem; narrow or broaden the inquiry when appropriate; synthesize multiple sources on the subject, demonstrating understanding of the subject under investigation. 

a.    Explore topics dealing with different cultures and world viewpoints.

3. Teachers can also use blogs to develop portfolios of their students’ written work. As a result, blogs provide students with the means to observe and reflect on their progress over time. They also allow students to share a history of their development with their parents, teachers and peers.  For these reasons, the collection of students’ best work across wide variety of writing formats serves to validate the written work of students.

College and Carreer Readiness Anchor Standards for Writing

Standard 10: Write routinely over extended time frames (time for research,

reflection, and revision) and shorter time frames (a single sitting or a day or two) for a range of tasks, purposes, and audiences.

All of the standards in this post were taken from the NYS P-12 Common Core Learning Standards.