8th Grade English (Christy Dalton)

Okay, so Christy Dalton is a fellow techie friend of mine who had this blog on Blogmeister for her 8th grade English classes. The emphasis here is on had... We were told that our district would use Edublogs (they wanted some consistency across the district in what we used and the ones in charge chose Edublogs) so Christy had to change her blog to Edublogs. Christy has been blogging with her junior high English students for a couple of years now. She gets these students to write reflections on literature they are reading in class. Student who would have refused to write a paragraph on a piece of paper were using this medium to make some pretty amazing reflections. The one thing that I didn't like about Christy's blog is that the student's writing has too many "errors". Some of the students are writing as if they were texting. I realize that this is how students write when they are communicating with their friends, but for an English class, I think that proper conventions should be required. I do not think that the students' writing needs to be perfect, but I think that the expectations could be a bit higher.
I enjoyed the Blogmeister version of Christy's blog better than her Edublogs version (and I know for a fact that Christy does too). Blogmeister is more user-friendly for setting up student blogs so that each student has their own page (remember that this is what Kathy Cassidy used as her blog tool). I really liked how Christy would give the students a topic to reflect on...many were about the books they were reading in class. The students would write their reflections and they could even add an image if they wanted. I would like to try this on my blog with my students. We read Number the Stars by Lois Lowry at the end of 4th grade so perhaps that would be my opportunity to use my blog in this fashion.
One thing I like about Christy's Edublogs version is that she has also used it as a way for her students to communicate with her as they researched and prepared their National History Day projects. It provided them with a forum to ask for assistance. I thought that was a good idea.

View Christy Dalton's old blog here: http://classblogmeister.com/blog.php?blogger_id=20495
View Christy's Edublogs blog here: http://cdalton209.edublogs.org/