To Blog Or Not To Blog...

As a journalist, blogging has been a big part of my education and professional life. I worked for a website right out of college that converged blogging, print journalism and broadcast journalism in the realm of college news and sports. I took courses in college that revolved solely around blogging as a form of journalism. So, as I embark on a new career as an English teacher with the hopes of teaching journalism or incorporating it into my classroom, the uses for blogging are endless.

In the widest sense, teaching a unit about blogging in journalism and having the students actually blog would be incredibly easy to add into my curriculum. Showing them examples of sports blogs, news blogs and entertainment blogs and then giving them an opportunity to create their own blog within their own interest area would be a great way to expose my students to this element of journalism and give them the chance to be creative. Teaching them the different between personal blogging and journalistic blogging will be a key point in this unit, so the students will also be able to continue exercising the journalism skills that they will have already learned and practice.

Taking this a step further, students could be asked to write journalistic blogs based on other assignments within the curriculum. For example, in a unit about the play Julius Caesar, students could act as a journalist assigned to chronicle the reign and subsequent demise of Caesar. They would be able to take the elements of the story and then "report" them in a blog. An assignment I completed in the college that I would like to adapt for a high school class was constructing a website based around a news story. I wrote print stories and collected audio and video about the different parking options for off campus students. I also incorporated a blog element, where I wrote columns that were opinion based to supplement my stories that were interview based. This would be a fairly easy assignment to adjust for a high school journalism class that would allow students to incorporate all their journalism skills into one project, including a blog that expressed their own opinion on the subject they were covering.

In an English class, the possibilities are endless for using blogging as a teaching tool.