Blog Assignment
My blog assignment, was inspired in part by Mark Warschauer (2010). Warschauer takes the conversation about teaching writing into the digital age, suggesting that technology be used to support student engagement with each other and with the larger Internet community. He argues that, usage of blogs and laptops serves “to help students write for a social audience and hone their words in response to others, while becoming sensitive to both the benefits and risks of expressing themselves online” (pg. 4). In other words, students not only become more aware of what they’re saying and to whom, but they begin to thinking about how they form their respective arguments and how to specialize those arguments for different audiences. I took Warschauer’s article to heart and, as a result, my students submitted all work electronically, routinely interacted with, critiqued and supported their classmate’s writing through shared Google Docs and, for their unit on The Handmaid’s Tale, wrote blogs to practice argumentative writing. Students not only had to make arguments, but also had to formulate arguments using conventions of blog-based text.
The assignment reads as follows,
The assignment reads as follows,
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This assignment has several details of note.
- It begins by very explicitly telling the students what the focus of the unit is and how various elements of the unit will push students to practice “making arguments.”
- It explicitly highlights the importance of using quotations and of using blog conventions.
- It gives the students a list of “tips and techniques to make your blog posts pop.”
- The four different blog prompts, each of which relates to the focus of class discussions for that week, all ask students to take argumentative stances.