What could you use a blog for with a class? An idea...

Here's an idea for something you might use a blog for with a group of students, especially teens with a level intermediate or above... a class newspaper project.

Approximate stages:

1. You create the blog, but don't show it to anyone yet
2. Have some sort of lead-in to the subject of newspapers and magazines, like carrying out a survey to discover who reads what. If you've got people who always finish tasks way before the others, or "mixed ability" groups, use the faster and/or better ones and keep them usefully occupied writing the survey.
3. Once you've done that, suss out whether or not they'd actually be interested in taking it further, and actually producing an online newspaper/magazine of their own.
4. If yes, show them the (empty) blog. Their task is to fill it before the "deadline", say in a week's time.
5. Put them in pairs and/or threes and make each pair/three responsible for one topic -- sport, films, international news, school/class news etc.
6. Each of those topics is then a separate post, all of which should be published on the same day, the day on which the "magazine" appears.
   

Note that there are various "editorial" decisions that need to be made. You could have one person from each pair/three on the editorial team, which would have to decide what items are to be covered, and what order they should be displayed in on the blog (twiddle the time & date line to fix it).

They can use the "save as draft" feature rather than posting immediately, which will allow you to do some correction, etc.

For their Blogger.com accounts, you could have joint accounts, ie. only one person sets it up, by uses (eg) Jordi, Mercé and Toni as the "display name", so that when they post, that's what appears under "posted by..."

If you get them interested, they could have a new issue every week... or fortnight, or month.

What do you think...?