Using blogging as a Creative way to promote literacy

I've never written a blog of my own, but I've certainly read a number of them. I have friends who taught English abroad in places like Japan and Korea. Needless to say, these are very interesting experiences that needed to be shared. These friends created blogs and kept up with writing journal entries and posting photos daily. It's especially interesting to read a blog from someone you know because you really get a chance to visualize what that person is learning and experiencing.

Now, I think that people who blog regularly have excellent writing skills. (Hopefully blog writing will wear off on me). This is the MSN and text messaging age where students are losing their abilities to put together a sentence. If we teachers used blogging as a way to ask students to write daily, I think it would make a huge difference. Plus, students may be more inclined to "write" on the internet rather than on a piece of paper. And it can be done in any subject; for example, I could require my students to keep a blog of the current science issues related to what we're learning in class. Hmm....I love coming up with new teaching ideas!

An even more interesting use of blogging is that it can be used as a publishing tool, which of course, is of special importance to high school English teachers. There is an article that promotes using these tools at: http://www.techlearning.com/db_area/archives/TL/2003/02/blogs.php