Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Posting 2: How Blogging Can Assist Language Learners To Improve & Enhance Writing Skill

If writing is considered an art, then blogging might be seen as a way of using words to come up with an art. Because people who are into blogging are “artistic” on their own sense: they carefully choose words that would best describe their feelings, sentiments, wishes, desires, and everything. Back in the mid-1990s, blogs were first introduced as weblogs that refer to a “server’s log file.”Since then web logging turned into blogging and gradually saturated the virtual community, making the Internet a viable source of greater information. With the onset of blogging in the industry, personal journaling had been a common ground for people who wish to be known all over the world. However, not literally famous as this is not a case on being popular or well-known personality. Generally, blogs are created for personal use. Like a journal, people can write their daily adventures, sentiments, and whatever ideas they want to express online. Blogs can also provide teachers and students writers with an engaging, rich writing space that requires no technical knowledge of HTML, while offering access to an instant publishing press. Blogs provide a space for writing that is two parts online journal and one part class discussion tool. They provide a forum, inviting commentary and discussion in addition to a long list of writing skills (e.g., concise language, strong voice, idea play). Blog characteristics particularly relevant to instruction include: 1. Economy. Blogs demand precision. The well-developed blog post requires no scrolling. It is a brief, targeted set of words that communicate an intended idea. Student writers have to get to the point from the start of the post. 2. Archiving. Each posting is dated and archived by week or day, depending on how the user preferences are set. This allows readers (and student writers) to explore how ideas unfold and connect over time. 3. Feedback. The comments featured on a blog encourage peer review and sharing. Instead of opening select passages for periodic (and often teacher selected and driven) feedback, the blogs initiate a process of interactive communication beginning with the initial post. Here, student writers receive immediate response, making the writing relevant, responsive, and real. In commenting, students analyze for ambiguity and are challenged to read for a writer’s purpose. 4. Multimedia. Blogs allow writers to post images and even record sound files. Blogs open student writers to multiple means of communication. 5. Immediacy. As soon as students publish a blog posting, their entry appears on the Web. This generates an immediate sense of accomplishment, and it permits the feedback and response loop to begin immediately. 6. Active Participation. Practical constraints of time and space prevent students from sharing ideas as they occur in classroom discussions. Blogs provide a communication tool in which each student can participate in that learning community, posting, connecting, seeing, reading, thinking, and responding in a contagious rhythm that leads to greater participation within the thinking space of the classroom. Used appropriately, electronic writing spaces can enhance motivation and teach real-world skills. With a new teaching tool in the arsenal, the next task becomes how to best employ it to support reading and writing in the classroom. Ten Instructional Activities Teachers are savvy at adaptation. We know how to take an instructional method or tool and rework it to fit our unique instructional spaces and needs. The instructional use of blogs requires this kind of rethinking and re-seeing. The following 10 instructional activities involving reinvention and adaptation of blogs for the classroom are built on standards-based, effective classroom practice. Literary Activities 1. Character Journals. This strategy challenges student writers to write as a fictional character. Posts require students to sound and think like that character, allowing space to complete a lower-stakes activity that explores voice and synthesizes higher-order understanding of what is happening in that reading. 2. Character Roundtable. This is a team-blog extension of the character journal. Here, multiple students make posts as multiple characters about a larger guiding question or theme. For example, one such “gathering” or conversation might involve Jay Gatsby (The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald), Willie Loman (Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller), and Walter Younger (A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry) discussing the American dream. 3. Open Minds. Using paper, this strategy requires that students draw the outline of an empty head that is then filled with images representing what the character would think or know at a given time in a selected reading. Brought into the blog, student entries could post both multiple images and reflective writing. 4. Think-Aloud Postings. Content postings reflect student analysis and response to assigned readings. This captures the same types of content that a student would orally express when conducting a traditional read aloud. 5. Literature Circle Group Responses. Traditional literature circle “reports” are completed on handouts or worksheets. By posting to a blog, student participants would not only be placing information and ideas into the greater class community for consideration, but they would also be provided with a reflective space that works beyond the constraints of the handout responses. 6. Nutshelling. This strategy challenges students to examine a paragraph and extract a line that holds the most meaning or presents an interesting starting place. In working with blogs, students review previous entries, select a rich line, and paste it into the body of a new post. They then begin their writing from there. This “nutshell” serves as the prompt for additional reflection and elaboration. 7. Devil’s Advocate Writing. In working with argument, blogs can house an interactive, multi-participant dialogue that pushes the reasoning within posts. In some ways, this might function as a precise, online debate. In another use, it might be a testing ground for the ideas students develop more fully in later writing. The fusion of the two allows students to locate the flaws in their argument, add depth to their original writing, and strengthen their reasoning. 8. Exploding Sentences. As Gloria Heard explains in The Revision Toolbox, this strategy challenges students to revise sentences. In working with blogs, students “explode” sentences from earlier posts by slowing them down, adding rich, descriptive detail. 9. Photo blogs. A photo blog is a blog that incorporates images. Print text is fused with visual imagery as students annotate and write captions leading the reader through the blog and the narrative conveyed by the images. 10. Story blogs. With a creative writing focus, a class-constructed story blog allows for writing and grammar instruction. With a nonfiction focus, the story blog becomes a class-written essay. This provides not only a model of how writers work but also a lower stakes entry point for students to write. REFLECTIONS: The aim of writing blog is actually to help you to improve your writing skills. From what I have read on the information given, I found writing a blog can be very interesting and enjoying. Of course we have the write something that will be able to capture people’s attention. In order to make someone read your blog, as what the information given, one’s must be creative. By writing blogs often, one’s creativity not only will be increased, at the same time also practicing their writing skills. Thus, in order to become a better writer, you need to read a lot to broaden your horizons, deepen your knowledge and get some fresh ideas as well. Besides that, blogs do provide a multi-genre, multimedia writing space than can engage visually minded students and draw them into a different interaction with print text. Furthermore, when reading blogs, you will pick up things that might inspire you and help you to improve your writing skills. http://itlab.coe.wayne.edu/jalshaibani/docs/reading%20writing%20blogs.pdf

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