Using blogs in Citizenship lessons and to support CVs.

For some time now, my Key Stage 4 students have been taught to use social media such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as old fashioned letters and phone calls to their local press and MP, to raise awareness for their campaigns. However, with news this week that Facebook is some Black Death-style phenomenon that will inevitably go into decline and oblivion by 2017, I feel - like a plague-carrying rat - that the time has come to jump ship.

 

So, the Schemes of Work have come out again, this time to incorporate the growing popularity of 'the blog'. A Facebook page is all very well, but let's face it, a blog is a much  more professional approach to tackling issues and setting up Citizenship projects, plus a blog can always be used in a link on a CV to explain much more about what students get up to in their own time than a tiny little paragraph ever could.

 

The benefits seem obvious to me. Students can learn how to produce blogs on just about anything, and can learn the value of occupying their own little space on the internet. Of course, a blog alone is not really active citizenship, but if it used as a tool to organise something in the real world, then it has the potential to be a very powerful medium.

I'll be teaching them to create blogs on local or global issues, but they can take the skills they have learnt to create blogs on anything else they may be interested in - journalism, fashion, sport, photography etc - and pool all those ideas together too. If further convincing is needed, the following clip from the BBC shows the case studies of two very successful teenagers, whose blogs would be absolutely invaluable on their CVs. Good luck to them.

PS. Any lesson on using social media to voice an opinion should be handled responsibly - so here is the legal bit on the dangers of libel and defamation.