Using Blogging to Promote Creative Writing

Blogging can be used to start a spark among a classroom of students around any given topic. It is the ideal medium for students to make contributions to a collaborative creative writing project starting with a single sentence. Students will be asked to write a sentence (or an entire paragraph) that expands a storyline or take it in an entirely new direction.

Think of it as a form of digital improv, where the goal is to get the creative juices flowing and students generating new prose as the minutes tick by in a structured writing session. This will teach students to express their ideas using a variety of writing conventions. The teacher sets the tone, requires that certain structures be utilized, monitors the flow of student contributions, then changes the tables by starting a new topic or introductory sentence.

The main thing is to start the ball rolling, then get out of the way!