@VirtualGardner and I are having our 9th grade students comment on each other's blogs this school year, and we are very excited for our students to have this opportunity. I believe this is a good first step in teaching students how to communicate effectively in the digital world they will be entering when they graduate, as well as having my students that there are opinions and ideas that exist in the world that don't come from a textbook.
Knowing the extent of my students' writing skills when they enter our building and seeing what happened in my summer school class when students were given little guidance on commenting on each other's blog posts, I decided that my students needed a little prompting/scaffolding in order to make quality, thoughtful comments. While some of my students this summer did an excellent job with their comments, some of the comments did not show much evidence of analysis or evaluation. The most disappointing comments were the quick responses of "Good job!" or "I liked your post!"
So, with some help from @Tools4Education, I developed four prompts that students could use (and they had to use one of these four) when making comments on blog posts:
You made some good points here, such as ______________________. I agree with them because ___________________________.
I disagree with the point you made about _____________________. The reason I disagree is _________________.
This post made me realize that ____________________________. Why it made me realize this is _______________.
A point about this you may want to think about is _______________________________. The reason you may want to think about it is because _____________________.
These simple prompts (also known as incomplete or writing frames) took about 10 minutes to put together, but they made a world of difference in letting students know what is expected when they comment. These also make the student actually read the blog post before responding with a quick "Great!" or "Really liked your post!"
For more great information about teaching students to write blog post comments, check out the resources below:
- See this lesson about student blog commenting, which also includes other resources related to student blogging.
- How to Teach Commenting Skills, which shows how a teacher tuaght an elementary class to comment with quality
- Student and Teacher Blogging that Succeeds by @shareski
- Blogging with Students: Interview with Greta Sandler (@gret on Twitter, courtesy of @shellterrell's Teacher Reboot Camp blog)
- My own Blogging in the Classroom diigo list