{"id":13651,"date":"2018-08-01T22:13:20","date_gmt":"2018-08-02T03:13:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theedublogger.edublogs.org\/?p=13651"},"modified":"2018-08-01T22:13:21","modified_gmt":"2018-08-02T03:13:21","slug":"high-school-english","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theedublogger.com\/high-school-english\/","title":{"rendered":"Case Study: Using A Class Blog In The High School English Classroom"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Image<\/a>This is a guest post by high school English teacher Howie Jakeway.<\/a><\/p>\n

Howie is Head of Learning Area, English and Languages, at St Stephen\u2019s School<\/a> in Western Australia.<\/p>\n

St Stephen’s School has a CampusPress network<\/a> that boasts some impressive blogs<\/a> for all sorts of classes and extra-curricular activities.<\/p>\n

Howie wrote this article about the transformative nature of class blogs in the English classroom for The English Teachers Association of Western Australia.\u00a0<\/a>We’re republishing it with permission.<\/p>\n

Note: Throughout this post, Howie mentions ATAR. This is the university entrance ranking score for students in their final year of school in Western Australia.<\/p>\n

\n

Getting started with classroom blogs<\/h3>\n

As an undergraduate at university in the early 90s, I remember being introduced to the thing that would indelibly change the world; change the ways in which we think and interact with the world around us.<\/p>\n

I stared blankly into a computer screen while my fellow student proudly informed me that I could ‘search’ for anything I needed to know on something called the Internet.<\/p>\n

I honestly didn’t know what I wanted to know, and anyway, I was sat in the university library where there were books on everything I needed to know.<\/p>\n

In short, I studiously ignored the internet phenomenon for the next decade or so and it didn’t permeate the ways in which I operated, either in the English classroom or in the outside world. However, the Internet \u2013and our relationship with it \u2013has changed the landscape of teaching indelibly, transforming the ways in which we teach, work and interact with our students.<\/p>\n

It was on these shifting sands of contemporary pedagogy that my work with classroom blogs was developed and it’s fair to say they’ve revolutionised my students’ relationship with the subject.<\/p>\n

Embracing the benefits of blogging<\/h3>\n

I currently run two classroom blogs:<\/p>\n