Blogging

This peer learning assignment and lesson plan series gives students the opportunity to explore digital composition.

This assignment was designed to get students to practice their close reading skills in a short, condensed format of a blog post.  Students sign up to blog for a given class day, chosing a short passage from the assigned reading for that day.

In two short blog posts, I asked students to choose an interesting or perplexing word to look up in the books we'd just finished reading. After conducting their research, students blogged about their findings and made a quick effort at applying their research to a passage. 

This lesson uses Photoshop to manipulate creative commons images found on the Internet into an avatar which represents the persona or ethos from which the student will write on a course blog.

Once students in my literature class achieve a basic skill set in textual analysis, I require them to take the reins of the course by providing the class with a blog post on the upcoming reading and presenting their findings to the class.