Grading blogs

So far this year, I am having a pretty good experience introducing and using blogs with my students. They all have their own blogs and are completing many of the shorter response type assignments I used to make them write on paper for homework on their blog. The only glitch with all this has been trying to organize a way to grade all this stuff efficiently. I believe in giving kids written feedback on everything they write, an I have found it to be rather time consuming to 1. enter each individualy blog, 2. search for and read the correct posting,, 3. write my comments, 4. enter the squiggly word code thing they want for EVERYTHING!, 5. click OK a number of times so my comment is allowed to post.. . .then back out of this blog and go to the next one.

One thing that has helped learning about and setting up my google reader. It was easy to import all the students' blogs and now I at least get an update when they post an assignment and I can easily access the blog to read and comment on it. I'm glad I learned that little tip right away in MILI!

There are still some bugs to work out with using blogs as an integral part of my media studies classes, but I am committed to working them out! I found it interesting (and a little scary) to listen to what the kids said in the Youtube video (top 10 reasons to use a blog in the classroom). This is definitely a way to engage many of our students today!