I heard a great idea at this year's NCTE conference in a session on teaching the Holocaust: blog partners. I decided to adapt it for my students study of Elie Wiesel's novel Night. You can read their blogs here, and here is my assignment sheet.
I asked my students to reflect a little on this new format for our blogging, and here is what one of them wrote: "Doing what we're doing now, with the interactive posting/commenting, is also a new way of doing things and, unlike some assignments using sites like this, you have to actually think about what you're posting." Another student wrote: "It helps me improve my knowledge on the material we are learning because when I write a blog post it allows me to test myself and to see what I do or don't know about the material."
This has always been one of my favorite works to teach, and now I think I have a blogging system that is equally strong.
