This past school year, my AP English Language students used blogs throughout the year. Two projects were very rewarding: 1) One quarter they did weekly blog posts on a current issue. Each student created a Google Reader account and subscribed to several news sites. Reading current issues regularly, they had to select a topic of their choice each week and write an argument. The last week, they omitted writing a post and “comment blogged”: I required them to visit six blogs and enter a conversation by posting a comment (three had to be blogs outside our school).

2) The last quarter my students created ePortfolios, documenting their progress toward the NETS for Student and the Arkansas English Language Arts Standards. It was one of the most rewarding projects I’ve undertaken. If you visit some of them, you’ll notice several of them used other digital tools–other than the blog–to format their portfolios. But–that’s the beaty: these kids started with the blog, then discovered other tools and used them in combination to create a product they wanted.