Learning Activity Overview 
The informal (with formal components) activity that I will be discussing for this project will be a webpage/blog site design. This activity will be completed by my high school students in a face-to-face learning environment, who vary in their stages of English language development. It is a very small group of students, two of which have been in the country for less than one year. My students will be challenged with deciding on a topic in which they have an interest. Once that topic is chosen and approved by me, they will create both their webpage name and their website address name, also with my approval. After this initial phase, the students will begin designing their web pages, with my in-class instruction, to go along with their chosen themes. Once this stage is completed, the students will then begin to research articles that are appropriate to their respective topics. They will also be able to comment on their classmates’ pages, thus creating opportunities for my students to educate each other about their interests.
I teach ESL (English as a Second Language) for high school and middle school children. It has always been challenging to find ways in which to make writing more appealing! I think the main reason for that is, the concept of writing in English is scary for many of my students. In order to effectively communicate through writing, one must learn the mechanics of this skill. Learning proper grammar takes time. With the widespread use of social media, distinguishing between proper grammar and “text talk” can prove to be tricky with my students. For this reason, I thought what better way to incorporate technology in the classroom, than to transform their love affair with social media into a tool that will help them to grasp writing in the English language.
Why Blogging??? 
Creativity in the classroom is one of the most important weapons any educator should be armed with, “Creativity of students and teachers plays a very important role in education” (Trnova, Trna, 2014). Students learn differently, but using a creative approach to teaching will help to produce the positive gains teachers seek.
Think of a blog as a digital journal. For the past year, and part of this new school year, I have always tried to incorporate journaling as a means of expression for my students. A few years ago, as I started my teaching journey, I began response journals. In other words, I would respond to what they had written. Many of the kids would tell me that they looked forward to reading my replies to their comments.
It is not just me, though. Many teachers and students have expressed their excitement over blogging in the classroom!
Read these articles below:
http://www.edutopia.org/blog/blogging-in-21st-century-classroom-michelle-lampinen
http://edtechreview.in/trends-insights/insights/687-best-ways-to-use-blogging-in-classroom
Enter the age of technology!!! 
My school district is participating in an initiative in which all students have access to either a laptop or tablet. This year, I knew I wanted to take advantage of the computers in some way. The most beneficial way for me would be integrating them in my weekly lessons as a composition book journal replacement! Because it is here to stay, technology can be an effective tool in engaging students, as well as a means of motivating them.
Incorporating technology in the classroom is the focus of Peta Gresham’s article, Fostering Creativity Through Digital Storytelling: It’s a Paradise Inside a Cage. The article chronicles the positive effects of “digital story telling technologies” (2014) had on a group of seventh year male students in Australia, as they studied a Civics and Citizenship unit.
Of the positive experience, one student exclaimed, “Using digital technologies to help me be creative is like paradise…in a cage” (Gresham, 2014)!
Read about how some teachers have utilized technology to help keep their students’ zest for learning in the links below!
http://www.usnews.com/education/technology-in-the-classroom
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/technology-in-the-classroom/
My Outcomes 
In order to effectively teach, one has to plan with specific objectives, or outcomes, in mind. Without them, it is like driving to a destination without a planned route. Sporadic teaching is not how students learn. When teachers plan their lessons with goals they would like for their students to reach, then that is when true learning occurs.
This will be an English language (ELA) content activity. The outcomes that I would like to see are improved writing skills, where my students are incorporating what I have taught them about correct sentence structure, as well as proper capitalization and punctuation. I also would like to see increased reading comprehension skills; both of which were also improved amongst the Malaysian students, “They reported that through weblog, they were able to write more and communicate more often with their classmates. Moreover, they believed that weblog was a good medium to improve their language proficiency in reading and writing” (Foroutan, Noordin, Hamzah, 2013). My students’ reading comprehension skills will be utilized as they will sift through countless, internet articles for relevant information pertaining to their blog page topics.
Assessing the Activity 
Assessments and evaluations are important tools needed in education. They help to measure what students have learned, as well as hold students accountable for their own learning outcomes, “Assessments help in promoting students’ engagement and willingness to take responsibility for their own learning” (Shepard, 2012). Evaluations and assessments are both used by educators as a means of improving they ways in which they teach students.
My students will be completing tasks online. Each week, they will be given a rubric. The rubric, which will be my way of formatively assessing and evaluating my students, will outline the desired outcomes of given tasks. At the end of the year, the students’ blogs will serve as a digital writing portfolio, which I will then assess summatively. Such guidelines that they will be graded on include their writing content relevance. Is what they have added to their websites for the week pertain to their chosen subjects? One of the more important aspects I will be focusing on is writing mechanics. The purpose of this activity is to improve upon my students’ writing skills. I will be grading their knowledge of forming a structurally correct sentence, as well as their use of capitalization and accurate punctuation. In addition, students will be graded on their resourcefulness of information gathering. I want to see if they effectively are able to research their topics. Through the use of the internet and its multitude of informative websites, I would like to see how precise they can be with delivering the most current news within their topics of interest. In essence, they will be reporters, informing me, as well as each other about the latest in their subjects.
This activity relies heavily on my classroom community; therefore, peer assessing is something that will be utilized throughout the duration of this year-long project. The children will be responsible for critiquing each others’ weekly content. When they post replies to each other, they will follow the rubric given to them to see if whether or not their classmates are on track with their post. They will also help to inform each other on any grammatical errors discovered while reading.
Technology is something that my students use on a daily basis. They are all attached to their electronic devices. I feel confident in incorporating web blogs in my curriculum as a means of improving their fluency.
Here are a few blogging resources for those of you who may venture into digital journal land:
http://elearningindustry.com/how-to-use-blogs-in-the-classroom
Below is the link to the rubric my students and I will be using! (Please copy and paste!!)
C:\Users\NRMS\AppData\Local\Temp\MyRubric.xls.htm
References:
Foroutan, M. Noordin, N., Hamzah, M. (2013) Weblog Promotes ESL Learners’ Writing
Autonomy . Journal of Language Teaching and Research. Vol. 4, No. 5, pp. 994-1002.
Gresham,P. (2014) Fostering Creativity Through Digital Storytelling: It’s a Paradise Inside a
Cage. English Teachers’ Association—METAphor. Issue 1.
Shepard, L.A. (2012) Assessment Lessons from K12 Education Research: Knowledge
Representation, Learning, and Motivation. AIP Conference Proceedings. Vol. 1413 Issue 1, p. 73-76. 4p.
Trnova, E., Trna, J. (2014) Implementation of Creativity in Science Teaching Training.
International Journal on New Trends in Education and Their Implications.
Vol. 5. Issue 3, pg. 54-63, 10 p.
Apple Pie ELLs 