Revising Blog Comments

As I indicated in a previous post, Mrs. Pintarelli and I discovered our students needed a re-fresher on blog commenting. We noticed that our bloggers, so enthused with being able to respond to their friends on line, were commenting with some lapses in netiquette and were writing comments that did not add to or start a conversation. We decided we needed to create a blog commenting rubric.

After discussing "3 Star, 2 Star and 1 Star" comments we sent our bloggers back to revise or write comments according to the rubric. As they wrote, Mrs. Pintarelli and I conferred with our bloggers.

I pulled up alongside one student, (I'll call him "Joe") hard at work writing a comment,  I asked him what I always ask writers in a conference "What are you doing today as a writer?" Joe answered that he was trying hard to write a comment that was longer than one sentence but he couldn't think of what else to write. I reviewed what he had written, a comment to a post about how video games can make you smarter. He agreed with his friend's blog post but so far all he could think to write was "I like video games too." I decided to teach Joe how to pick one part of a blog post, one line, that resonates with you and write off of that line.

"Joe", I began, "you are so smart to know that your comment is really too short to be a worthwhile comment and I like how you are trying to think about how you can add something to this comment so it can be a 3 Star comment. Let me show you one thing you can do when you really agree with someone's post." I scrolled back up to the post. "Joe, re-read this post for a minute and as you do I want you to think about which part of it, what sentence you have a strong connection with." Joe read the post to himself. "There." he pointed to the screen. "This part, where he says video games are not a waste of time. Video games make you smarter". I agree with that. "Why?" I asked him, "because", Joe continued, "I have a video game it's called Smarter than a Fifth Grader and I know it makes me smarter when I play it".

"OK", I said, "Now let me show you how you can take that one line and write about why you agree with it". I took the mouse and gave Joe a little lesson on copying and pasting a line. "Now", I said as I pasted the line in his comment box "write about why you agree with that line".