A New Endeavor

Hello, everyone who comes across this.

I've experimented using blogging a few times over the years with varying levels of success. It's been an attempt on my part for students to find an audience, but the amount of content can be overwhelming as a teacher. And in the end, the students' main audience was still me--not really any different from writing papers for a class.

So here's my one-more-attempt at finding a balance between accomplishing some of the goals of an English Language Arts (ELA) classroom while giving students a chance to find an authentic audience.

This will be a junior class project as we get rolling in the 2023-2024 school year. All juniors enrolled in LA3 will need to write at least two articles for this site. One will be more informative, and one will be more opinionated. This will help cover some of the required standards for ELA. At the same time, it will help all of us learn more about our RS community.

I hope to see a handful of articles get posted each week. In order to make them printworthy, LA3 classes will spend part of one class period each week workshopping the articles for the week. This covers even more language and collaboration standards.

Over the years, my students have also created podcasts about the novels they have been reading for class. I'm hoping to showcase some of those to this site moving foward, too.

I'm excited for the possibilities with this. It gets me back to my roots as a newspaper reporter, and hopefully provides students a chance to learn more about writing for an audience.

Location: Story City, IA 50248, USA

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