Elizabeth Fullerton has her students using Weblogs in groups to report and comments about sports, music, movies, reality television and news. I always think it’s interesting to look at how students’ writing voices become so audience oriented when they start blogging. These are no exception.
Most of what her students are doing is exposition, but it’s not a huge step to get them doing some basic blogging; reading stories from other places and bringing the content into their own Weblogs to comment and link. I’m convinced that is where the true value of student Weblogs lies. It’s nice to be able to give them an audience and a forum for publishing their views, but the synthesis that blogging demands is where the real learning happens, I think.
I like the way Elizabeth is taking the time to nurture her students relationship with audience as well. She’s posting stats about their use and how they show up on search engines. But she’s a blogger herself, so I guess that’s no surprise…
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