Some of my twitter acquaintances have started a new blog, The Mommy Gig. And as I was reading it, I was thinking about other “group” blogs like LeaderTalk for administrators, or like Students 2.0.
I like the idea of using a group blog for students in a class as well. It’s a way to feature different writers, have a variety of voices, and keep students coming back to read what their peers wrote as well.
Have any of you used group blogs like this, with a class? I’d be interested in hearing how this worked differently than students having individual blogs. Pros and cons?
I’m so glad you took a look at This Mommy Gig! I actually did a group blog with my 6th graders earlier this year and they had a blast with it. Each student had the ability to post and they had so much fun commenting on all of the posts of classmates. It made everything so easy because we didn’t have to set up 30 individual blogs. I did this using edublogs – it was wonderful!
Hi Carolyn,
I had students write on a collective history class blog as the reflective companion of the Broken World wiki textbook they created (World War I to World War II).
The Broken World Blog was a success, I thought, though hard to keep up with (40 students wrote on it weekly). The only requirement was that students write once a week on whatever detail or topic captured their fancy from the week’s student lectures. That made each entry unpredictable, and opened all of our eyes to the individual interests each student had in history. It was cool.
I don’t know how I would do it differently next time, but I would try to minimize the amount of new posts per week (maybe make group blogs for groups of ten, so that each week no new posts would be pushed into the archives too quickly? Seems a good idea!).
I would also encourage Skype podcast interviews with outside experts as permissible blog entries to spice things up.
But overall, I really liked it.