Sample Blogging Lesson Plans:

There are several ways educators can use Blogs in the classroom. Here are just a few ideas that can be modified and used at any grade level accordingly. These lessons have been retrieved from Teachers First: Blog Ideas for the Classroom.

Week  in review:

Appoint a weekly blog team from the classroom to write that week’s blog entry, describing the events of the week in the class. To add parental involvement, invite parents to comment on the posts. This assignment could help those students who were not in attendance for the week to not feel disconnected from their classroom.

Post a prompt:

Post a biweekly writing prompt on the blog and have the students respond by a certain day. Ask them to also comment on one of their classmates ideas by drawing a name from a hat or rotation to be sure that all students receive a comment from someone. Foster process writing peer-editing by asking each student to make a suggestion for improvement to content and mechanics (editing) of the other student’s submission. This would work best if the blogging website being used has the added security of the approval process before allowing students responses to show.  The teacher can skim posts to be sure there is nothing cruel or inappropriate being written. For added parental involvement, invite parents to comment on their children’s posts.

Respond to a reading:

Practice good reading strategies and check comprehension by asking students to respond to an assigned reading, reflecting on how it applies to their own experience.

Current Events:

Post a link to a current events story and ask students to comment on its implications in your local community or their own lives. Younger students can respond to stories from the local newspaper’s online pages.

Find the facts:

Post a statement with no supporting facts. Ask students to find facts to support or rebut the opinion, using links to reliable web sites and their own persuasive explanations. This could work best for environmental issues, political issues, or any topic that is debatable.

Report on a vacation or long weekend:

After returning from a break, have students write a blog entry from the point of view of the family dog on their weekend trip or even as the duffle bag/suitcase they packed and took along. Always encourage commenting on each other’s stories.

Meet during inclement weather days and other unexpected days off:

As part of the blogging contract, the teacher could instruct the students to post on the class blog during unexpected days off, perhaps due to inclement weather. The teacher posts a prompt on the class blog for students to answer from home. An example question is: What unexpected surprises did you have on this day? For those students without internet access from home, allow them to write on paper and help them find time at school to post, so they do not feel left out.

Report on a field trip or virtual field trip:

Have students act as reporters telling about a field trip or special event. They can pretend to have interviewed a cow at the farm they visited or be straightforward in reporting the real events of the trip. Students could also write up a virtual field trip they took online in a class.

Write a neighborhood or community tour with pictures:

As a culmination of a unit on the community or local history, students can create a neighborhood or community tour blog. Each student (or pair) can take and upload a picture and then tell about the picture. To add parental and community involvement, invite others in the school or parents to make comments about their favorite locations. For security reasons, do not include any pictures of students.

Question blog:

Invite students to submit a question about course content, related ideas, or have always wondered before beginning a new unit. Asking students to express one curiosity before starting the unit will give the teacher a place to focus and make the content more meaningful to them. This is an electronic version of the KWL Chart.

Here are several examples of rubrics to assess a classroom blog.