Next year, I’m planning on having my students blog more. In the past, we’ve used Edmodo with limited results in this area because it is more closed than a traditional blog, so I would like to give them more ability to share their writing. I’ve thought about doing this for the past few years – last post? three years ago – but for curricular reasons, I’ve just never been able to do it. I think that I have a good grasp of what I would like the students to accomplish, but I’m concerned about the following:

• motivation: how to keep the students motivated
• commenting: I need to figure out a way to get beyond the “I like it!” comments
• authentic writing: how to focus on the writing being authentic and not formulaic
• images: inclusion of images or not
• the unknown: it frightens me terribly.

If anyone has any suggestions or has had any success with blogging, please leave me a comment and let me know. I think that I’ll have about 125 students next year, so it is a large group of kids.