The benefits of blended learning are plenty and the most recent educational standards require digital literacy to be built into every class curriculum. Blended learning enables students to:
- Access vast amounts of online information and professional communities and thus broadening their perspective.
- Interact and engage with professional communities, classmates and instructor more frequently.
- Participate in discussions when/how they are comfortable. Online space becomes a safe environment in which they've had time to reflect and share their thoughts.
-Personalize their experience by moving forward or repeating certain aspects of course curriculum at their own pace.
- Be motived by immediate results and feedback through automated quiz scoring and comments from peers.
- Be 21st Century ready because they are digitally capable, can work and collaborate online, and can solve problems in real world context.
Blogs offer the teacher of writing a way to harness the benefits of blended learning to her/his student's advantage. In my last post I linked to the case study correlating positive writing skill improvement through use of blogs as curriculum. Although the study focused on use of blogs to immerse students in a foreign language, I feel the positive outlook still holds true for writing in English class.
Some highlights from the case study include:
- At first students were surprised they had to blog, the overall experience was very rewarding for them.
- Total word count on ungraded blog assignments were higher than graded blog assignments (I translate this to positively point to student's enjoyment and need for freedom of expression.)
- Citing other research concluding that "writing on computers and communicating in cyberspace is highly motivational", "writing became a 'fun' activity", "students tended to write less self-consciously and were more engaged in the process",
- Overall students improved their use of language and sentence accuracy.
- Student survey reveals that 100% of students feel they are somewhat or much more comfortable communicating in writing after using blogs.
- Student survey reveals that 76.9 % of students liked writing blogs while 15.3 % didn't like it but 7.6 % really liked it. And 69% felt they wrote more because they were writing online.
Finally, I like to share From Blog to Book Deal: How 6 Authors Did It with my students. Its an interesting listing and interview with six blog authors on how their online writing became money-making great selling books! The blogs cover a variety of topics ranging in content from collection of pictures, a collection of quotes, how to start your business, fatherly advise, and others.
Other examples of blogs turned into books can be found at: How to Blog a Book, Popular Blog Turned Book Books, Websites that Became Books, and Blog-Turned-Book Success Stories.
Go ahead and start using blogs. Your students will truly benefit and find their voice.
Happy Writing!
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