Reflection on Writing and Grammar: Blogs

In the discussions about using CALL applications to focus on writing and grammar, one of the more interesting topics for me was Katie's presentation about using blogs for responding to readings in a writing course. I think the idea of using blogs to encourage response to readings is appealing, but there are a number of problematic aspects about implementing them that Katie discussed. Some of these relate to motivation, commenting on others blogs and grading responses.

In general, I think using blogs to respond to course readings can be difficult to get going. I think at the beginning of a course where a teacher plans to implement blogs it would be helpful to orient learners to this medium and the genre of a reading response. Perhaps the first week could be spent on having learners pick out features of a blog posting they feel is thoughtful and shows someone has read the materials well. This would help build the context some before diving into writing them.

It would also be helpful for the teacher to work with the students to create a rubric for grading the blogs. In the process of analyzing other reading response blogs, the students and the teacher could co-create a checklist or rubric of features of a good blog post and good comment. They could also agree on how many comments they feel would be appropriate each week.

Katie mentioned that it is important to assign student blog groups, so that that students are responsible for checking a few student's blogs and exchanging comments on them each week. To keep the blogging from become stale, it might also be helpful to switch the blog groups every 2-3 weeks so that students could be assigned a different classmates' blog to read.

While blogging has been around for a while and is widely used in writing courses, this presentation gave me some new ideas to consider if I decide implement a blog in a writing/reading course in the future. The last idea I think would be fun to try would be to have L2 learners blog about the graded readers they are reading as part of an extensive reading program.