We Should be Teaching Students How to Blog
Social media is the ultimate equalizer. It flattens hierarchy and empowers those with big ideas and hustle to get their message out to the masses. Young people today have an incredible opportunity that is the envy of many big thinkers that came before them. They have a medium in which to share their ideas and passions with the world quicker, cheaper and further reaching than ever before. They can blog.
We need to teach young people how to blog.
Plain and simple, the single most empowering thing one can do for a student is help them find their voice. Today, we can’t stop there, we must also help them find and amplify their digital voice. When I was working at Rutgers, I taught our student leaders how to blog. Here are a few lessons I learned from this experience.
Lesson #1: First critique, then write
Just because students grew up as ‘digital natives’ doesn’t mean they know how to navigate social media or blogging like an expert. It is important to have students identify what makes a good blog post before they write their own. Have students start by being the critic before they are a writer. Have them find a blog post that resonates with them, and ask them critique the content, design, voice etc.
Lesson #2: Give them autonomy
Give them some autonomy when it comes to what they will write about. At Rutgers we gave our students an “experiential checklist” (comment below if your interested in seeing the checklist, and I will send it to you) with 25 items from which to choose. Over the course of the semester they picked 3 experiences to do and then blog about. A few sample experiences are:
Interview a parent of an incoming college student and write about the experiences, fears and feelings associated with sending a child to college.
Attend a meeting of a club as a non-member, and write a critique of how they run their meetings.
Watch 3 different movies set on a college campus and write about the way the media depicts the college experience.
Lesson #3: Make it real
Use an actual blog. So many universities say they use blogging in classes, but really its just the LMS “blog function”. We used Blogger one semester and WordPress the others. It doesn’t really matter what you use, as long as it is real. When it’s an actual blog it feels real and students are more compelled to make it a good post. Posts are shared on Facebook and Twitter, and students learn to take pride in their work. Also they are starting to build their digital footprint, as the content will be searchable if it is on a real blogging platform.
Young people are our future leaders, and they will need to have a strong digital reputation among many other skills and traits to thrive as a leader. Infusing blogging into the curriculum and co-curriculum will empower our students to be digital leaders, and teach them an important skill they can use in just about any industry they enter upon graduation. Are you working in education? How have you taught students to build a strong digital reputation? I’d love to hear about it.
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