In my educational experience, I have only ever had one teacher make me keep a journal. I have often kept one that I wrote in sporadically, but I learned a lot from my journaling in my class. Because I knew that it was for a class, I was slightly more serious, but not as formal as I would have been in an academic paper. But because this balance was possible, my speaking abilities improved because I had practiced writing about casual things in a grammatically correct way, without the distanced feel that can accompany unexperienced writing in a formal paper. Because of this, I learned how to write in simpler, more readable sentences that actually communicated better than my lofty, big word essays from high school.
Basically, for a teacher, using blogs provides a journal for students to practice writing. It records when students make an entry so I can catalog their progress. Also, I think that a blog, rather than a paper journal, would be more appealing to teenagers who like to be online. They love creating MySpace and Facebook accounts and so if I present the blogs in the right way, I can excite them to create an online profile of not only pictures, which they can add, but more importantly for writing improvement, a log of written entries. I feel more of my students' writing would improve if disguised in this fun format. Of course, I would send an explanatory paper and instructions home for parents, who might be wary of the internet. In this blogging endeavor, I would use these as individual entries, and then use my website blog for class discussion about the literature we cover in class.
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