Personal Narrative with BloggingEnduring UnderstandingsStudents will begin to understand:
- Purpose and audience for communication determine the appropriate media choice.
- Design and layout impact the quality and effectiveness of communications.
- People reflect on, organize, analyze, interpret, and synthesize information in order to effectively communicate and create ideas.
Students will begin to understand:
- Writers attempt to have a story unfold in a show, not tell, fashion through well-chosen details that make a story come alive
Essential QuestionsHow do I effectively communicate?
GRASPS Task
Goal:
Role:
Audience:
Situation:
Purpose:
Build Understanding:
Explain: Reflective blog post: After collecting entries: try various stories to see how it goes - select a story and improve it, why did you choose this story?
Interpret: personal narrative practice, once you've selected your story, what is this story really about?
Have Self-Knowledge: Author's message - the way you write and present the story shows the significance of the story to the reader. Reflective writing after - why did you write this story this way, how does it reflect you? What was challenging for you? What do you understand about yourself from writing this?
Have Perspective: Reflection: who is your audience, why/how would you change this story for a different audience (how do you change the way you write based on your audience?) - during revision, write the same story for a different audience - how do you change your writing for different audiences
Empathize: after the blog post is up, how do you respond via the comments (to something that you don't have a connection with).
Apply: Design your blog post for your audience, choosing images, paragraph spacing, headings, etc (choosing an image that shows depth and connects to your post)
- Allow students the choice to either write in Writer's Notebook first or directly on the computer
- Have students write in MS Word before posting online (to avoid technical issues)
Mini-lessons:
- Teacher models same sort of writing as the students are doing. Write a portion of personal narrative and then show how you would change it for a different audience. Give students the choice of who their new audience is.
- What does good blogging look like? (synthesis, analysis - not just copy and paste)
- Students link to other sites in his/her writing (for example, if you snorkeled on Phuket, link to a Phuket site)
- Students reflect on why he or she is choosing this piece of writing.
- Commenting and how to make it constructive. Set a minimum expectation of how many comments a student must write on someone else's writing.
- Students incorporate comments from others and make revisions to his/her own writing based on these.
- Final reflective blog post linking back to prior drafts, comments by their audience that helped change their minds, and reflect on how the interaction with their audience helped improve their writing.
- Choosing and inserting an image, citing sources for images
Timeline:
First 8 instructional days: brainstorming in the writer's notebook, across those 8 days, choose 2-3 stories to post on the blog (reflect online why they chose those three) - these posts should be in draft form, then students will choose 1 to stick with and take through the writing process (reflect online why they chose the final story)