Blogging and Podcasting

    This unit was a little shorter than some of our previous units, but it's one that I had a lot more interest in. I experienced blogging and listening to podcasts during my time as an ELA high school student. 

    For a class that I took in my freshman year of high school, an elective that was called Writing for Social Media, we had to listen to an episode of a podcast for class. That my first introduction to podcasts. I remember we listened to a podcast episode in class that our teacher just wanted us to listen to, but then for the one we had to listen to on our own, we got to pick any podcast about any topic. I remember I picked a podcast called Pilot's Lounge, where these two cousins discussed the pilot episodes of popular TV shows. 

    My blogging experience came from being a writer for my high school's newspaper. We had to keep a blog, and my first year on staff, I did one about health and fitness, a phase I was in. Looking back now, I cringe. My second year I had much more fun with my blog: Blogs About Dogs, in which I talked about different dog breeds, because I love dogs. 

    I think that blogs are such a nice addition to the classroom, and fit very well in ELA classrooms because students can express themselves write about whatever interests them. In "'Can we blog about this?': Amplifying Student Voice in Secondary Language Arts", author Christina Melly points out that blogging filled her students' needs for regular writing practice. She said that, "to become better writers, we needed to become more consistent writers" (13). Blogging is a perfect way to practice writing, especially when students are writing about something that they like. 

    Some students in my newspaper class in high school chose to do podcasts instead of blogging, so while I was never one of those students, I know some that were. In "Voices and Sounds Heard: Composing Through Narrative Podcasting", something that authors Guggenheim, Glover, and Mejia found was that some students were uncomfortable sharing in previous ELA classrooms. So before they created their podcasts, they journaled (writing practice!!!) and then when it came time to create a podcast, they had so many options to choose from to talk about. I personally really like the idea of students creating a podcast in class, and I think if I were to assign it, I would make it a group project between two or three people. Blogs to me are more individual, so I would love to use podcasting to open up collaboration between students.