I_ _ _ _ _ _ ing with Blogging in the Classroom?

This is officially my post about blogging in the classroom.  I've had more than enough time to think about it, and it seems that every time we meet in class, the blogging gets brought up as a viable medium to share videos, collect student writing, and generally engage student interest.  The first and most malleable way I thought of using blogging in the classroom was to establish a multi-genre blog; a blog where students share different genres of writing and media they've made throughout the school year.

The multi-genre project was a concept I initially disliked during my junior year at Iowa State.  After being given the directions to "just go create different genres of works", I was lost in the sea of infinite possibilities of items to create.  So first and foremost, my students would have set examples and options to choose from in their projects to get them started.  After that, they may find a niche where they feel they can excel and gain interest in, which from there they could just clear genre ideas with me, and I could help keep them on track.

Just how many genres could students choose from?  Well, as many as you could think of.  Anything you would see in printed formats would be fair game (a chapter from a book, fan fiction, short story, anything you would see in a newspaper, how-to guide for activities and hobbies, etc).  Also, any media such as a news report, a how-to video, or a film short would be viewed as a creative entry into the blog site.

But let's get to the nitty-gritty:  How can I innovate the curriculum using a blog as the medium for the multi-genre project?  The best current idea I can think of is to use a system similar to what we grad students do here in blogger:  utilize the blogs for peer collaboration in and out of the school.  After they've completed several drafts of different genres, (and after they find their 'niche') I would be able to sort students into like-minded groups, where they could give feedback on their peers' works.

This would also set up student group work for success, as a group of students who are interested in journalism-oriented genres could collectively create a news broadcast together.  I would also keep these student groups in their own separate blog communities, to keep accountability high, and to keep unfocused feedback from outside groups low.   Students interested in short stories could come out with their own short book of collected works.  Much of the collaboration would occur online.  At the end of the year, student blog sites would then open to the public (or just the classroom), where students could then look at what other groups had been doing throughout the course.

I'd like to finish these thoughts on blogging with two items.  First, I'm a proponent of using the classroom to help students attain skills they'll use in the world, and to me this kind of project makes sense.  As an example, one of my friends who writes for the Iowa State Daily, commented that if he didn't have his blog of sports commentaries and summaries, he wouldn't have gotten his job.  Giving students a sense of those real-world perspectives helps them achieve an almost real-world satisfaction, while helping them acquire those skills to showcase later in their lives.

Second:  Is what I've said above really using innovation?  I still have trouble pinpointing what innovation really is, as I find my thoughts generally stray to implementation.  In the very first paragraph of this post, I deferred to the word 'using' in "using blogging in the classroom", which I initially wanted to say implementing blogging the classroom.  Thus the title of this post:  both words start with "i", but a lot of the time I feel lost when I'm trying to identify the difference between implementation and innovation.

Is it possible to innovate with blogging?  Is the multi-genre idea above more implementation than innovation?  I'd like to, by the end of this course, be able to generally pinpoint where blogging falls, when it comes between the two different "i" words.  Please feel free to express your thoughts.  But in the meantime, I'll suffice with saying blogging in the classroom should definitely be done whether it is done with i _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ tion or i _ _ _ _ _ tion.