Blogging with my grade 8 students

I created a new blog to use with my grade 8 social studies classes.

Here's the post I used to explain how and why we will be using our blogs this year:

The purpose of your blog is to make your learning visible. This will include:

• improving your thinking and writing skills
• learning new things and re-thinking the things you already know
• sharing your blog with others so that others can learn from you and you can learn from others

Sometimes I will provide you with something to write about and other times you will choose the topic of your blog posts. Sometimes you will pick when to write a blog post and other times I will pick.

Sometimes we will use the school's computers and sometimes you will use your own devices. There are lots of apps you can download that will allow you to blog on your device, and if you want to, you can access your blogs from home.

Sometimes we won't have access to computers or the Internet, so sometimes we will first write our blog posts on paper and then later put them online.

Your blog posts will often include:

• thinking and writing
• pictures
• video
• links to other websites and blogs

Here's a blog post that I wrote that shows how I used a video, excerpts from books, links to other websites and a picture to help support my own thinking and writing.