Analyzing Teen & Teacher Weblogs

Blogs have been written by children as young as 8 and by senior citizens in their 80s. They range widely in style and content. To prepare to design lesson-specific blog activities, we should begin by getting familiar with blogs in the wild: the writing people do for its own sake within this medium.

Print out the features chart below and use it to look for instances of each of the qualities listed in the first column. Each letter at the top of the columns is a link to a specific blog. There are additional blank rows for you to use for additional qualities as they occur to you. In each cell, put a 0, +, or ++ to indicate whether each blog has that quality not at all, a little or a lot. When we're finished, we'll look over the chart to see what patterns we can discern.

© 2004 - Bernie Dodge. Write for permission to use elsewhere.