Blog Project Inspiration
The blog that I found that inspired me for this project is called Excellence and Imagination which was set up by a Canadian teacher named Mr. Fischer (click the hyperlink for his Personal Blog). In this blog activity, he had his students write their own blogs for a project on colonization. What I found to be really interesting is that the students were writing from a first person perspective, meaning that they were writing as if they were the people who were colonizing the different lands. As I read through some of the blog posts, I was amazed at how much student research was reflected in their posts. They were very well written and very carefully thought out.
I found this blog to be a great example of how teachers can take traditional projects to a whole new level. This assignment could have been done through a series of diary entries, but by putting it into the blog format, it opened up a whole new world of connectivity that allowed students to interact in a way that you cannot duplicate with paper and pencil. Very well done.
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One of the teachers at my school has her students create a whole identity for a novel character on MySpace (but could be done on a blog if sites like MySpace are blocked by your school). Using the blogging model, students begin to interpolate the character, taking what they learn from the novel about the character and putting him/her in different situation or to think how they would see themselves.