Blogs in the Theatre Classroom

As a theatre teacher, I will be around technology for the entire school day. Lights, sounds, set designs, show research, costume making, etc. all depend on some sort of technology to be produced. While I know about these technologies, I have never really paid a thought to any sort of technology dealing with teaching my students. Throughout the week and a half of this class, I have already come up with ways to use social media within a theatre classroom. For this post, I will expound upon using blogs within the theatre classroom. Blogs can be used with anonymous names as a way to help students open up and communicate freely as in Dr. Woods-Wilson's study within the Web 2.0 textbook. It would also be an interesting way to open up communication between my students and theatre professionals throughout the world. With a setup like either one of the examples, the students would have to make a minimum number of original posts and responses a week. The students would be graded on a rubric scale with emphasis to writing structure, grammar, and post content. Grading the students on writing structure and grammar will. hopefully, help to increase the students' literacy, something that all teachers are being pushed to work on. With these activities, the goal would be to learn how to effectively communicate as well as to learn about the theatre world through their peers' eyes and through the professional world of theatre. Their posts and the, hopefully, increasing complexity of the students' communication will show that they are learning about the world of theatre as well as how to effectively communicate using proper English language and grammar.