Revising Blog Posts

Digital Writing, like any other writing, is process based - writers plan for, draft, revise and edit. We reminded students of this process today as we taught our bloggers strategies for revising blog posts. 

In teaching students non-narrative writing revision, I often teach them to include (color coded in the example below) a fact, a thought, a quote, a story and a number (small statistic)  

ex: Teachers love learning with each other. I think that is important because learning can feel lonely if you have no one to share your new ideas with. The other day in the teacher's room, Mrs. Poole shared an idea with me that I just loved and said "I love sharing ideas with you because you get so excited about new learning". One day last week, all the fourth grade teachers met to have lunch together because Mrs. Karam learned some new ways to teach essay writing and she wanted to share the ideas with everyone else. As the teachers ate lunch together, they all learned something new by sharing how they might take Mrs. Karam's ideas in their own classrooms. Sometimes teachers have professional days where only teachers come to school and no students come. In fact, 3 times a year teachers have professional days where the whole day is just about teachers learning new things together.

Mrs. Pintarelli modeled this revision technique on the Smartboard by showing students how she used it to write her most recent post about her daughter's gymnastics competition.

Mrs. Pintarelli modeling her revision on the Smartboard.

Because blog posts are written for comments, we added "ask a question" to the list of revision techniques. Students then went back to their posts and revised according to our list:

Here is how the author of "The Dentist" revised her post:

 

Here is her original post before the revision: