George Mayo is a first year English teacher in Virginia Beach, Va. who has his sixth graders blogging in the “M & M Online Magazine.” It’s basically a series of 15 individual student blogs connected by a magazine homepage. It’s just coming together, but the best part of it is that his kids are obviously blogging about their passions: fashion, the NFL, skateboarding, video games, etc. And, they’re obviously not just writing for themselves:
Good evening every one this is Jean-Herbert R. writing. Today I will be writing about Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. In this video game you could be Harry, Hermonie, and Ron. The main idea of this game is that you have to fight the evil Dementors and you have another promblems…
In an e-mail, George writes:
Its been a great experience so far. I’m amazed at the care that most of the students are taking with their writing. Its also amazing to watch them spontaneously peer edit each other’s work.
It CAN be pretty amazing when kids are allowed to practice writing with topics that they are really interested in. Throw in a pinch of an audience, and this is a formula that would seem to be pretty conducive to enhancing a student’s ability to write.
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