Blogging and the SAMR model

https://triciafriedman.coetail.com/2016/04/02/dividends-on-an-investment/

One of the problems that I've had over the past two days in Technology in Education has been because of my planned double endorsement: I've been seeing ways right and left to connect technology in new and unique ways to future social studies classes, but not to my future ELA courses. I literally have a list of ideas a half a page long for ways my future social studies classes can use technology beyond just making powerpoints and watching documentaries. Some of these ideas can probably be adapted easily to ELA when I take some time to sit down and think it out. However, at the moment, I have a grand total of one innovative idea of a way to use technology on an M or R level of the SAMR model in an ELA class. It is, however, an idea that I am absolutely in love with.

Blogging.

One of the videos (link above) that I watched today was about a teacher who implemented a year long blogging project with her class. Instead of having students write variations on the same papers over and over again, why not have them write to various topics, and then share them with their classmates, and eventually the rest of the internet? When I watched this, I could instantly see an ELA blog that my students worked on throughout the year being used in a way similar to Interactive Notebooks that various teachers have talked about - it give students a way to compare where they started at the beginning of the year, to where they have landed at the end of the year. It gives student a finished product (here is a portfolio of the writing that I have done this year), and, since grades are required, it gives me something to clearly grade at the end of certain timeline marks (does your blogging show an improvement from point A to point B?). It can be a space for students to choose topics that they want to write about, and it can also be a space for me to assess what student's thoughts or skills are regarding a particular subject, novel, or writing skill. More than that, it can be a space for creativity. The best thing about a blog is that it can be written any way you want. Yes there would be conventions (we are practicing proper spelling and grammar, it needs to be a least x length long etc), but outside of these, it can be a great space for students to write in a way that is fun for them. It can be a space to talk about what students are passionate about (or at least something that they kind of like, on days that I give them a more specific topic) in a way that they are passionate about.

Blogs can be a powerful tool for differentiation, too. Not all students like to write, but if they don't like to blog, they can vlog instead. Or share drawings. Or whatever ways they can think of to express themselves on a specific topic.

The only way to get a student blog at the M or the R level of the SAMR model, though, is by sharing it out - at least with the classroom community, but preferably through a bigger internet community. By sharing it with a larger community, we are changing the levels of connectedness our students are able to reach on a given school day. It redefines the audience that we are writing for - not for the teacher, or for my peer editor - with blogs, we are writing for whoever wants to read.