Blogs Becoming More Than Just A Blog

Blogs have become a lot more these days than just a place to write down our thoughts. My little cousin called me last night wanting to know if I could help her find a pretty layout for her blog. My response was you have a blog? She's 15, and I know she has a Myspace blog, but I didn't know she has a blog outside of Myspace.

Think educational tool...

She explained that her English teacher gave them a project. They are all keeping blogs that can only be seen by the teacher and all their classmates. Each day part of their homework is to write something interesting in their blog. It can be a poem, short story, something as simple as the piece of volcom clothing she likes, or anything that gets her creative juices flowing. At the end of the next semester the kids will be allowed to decide if they want to make their blogs public or keep them private for just their classmates to see.

I think this is such a great idea! When I was in High School I took a medical explorers class. I had to shadow 60 hours at the hospital, and everyday when my shadowing shift was over I had to write down my experiences in a journal. At the end of the week we had to turn our journals into our teacher to be graded. Unfortunately this caused a problem because a lot of us chose to knock out a lot of our shadowing hours on Saturday, so we ended up with loose notebook paper stuck in our journals to cover the days we couldn't take our journals with us.

If we'd kept online blogs of our experiences not only would it have been easier for us, but our teacher could have read them whenever she liked. I could also go back and look at my experiences at any time. I know I still have my journal packed away somewhere, but if I wanted to read it I'd have to pull out a ton of boxes just to find it. Keeping the blog also inspires you to write, and hopefully a lot of these kids will continue to write long after they've left this class.