The power of blogging for students

There have been so many success stories for my students with blogging but yesterday's example is one never to be forgotten. One of my year 10 boys has a learning disorder - he is a nice student but completes little in traditional subject areas-never a behaviour problem just rarely completes anything. Over the last two years he has been in my information technology classes as multimedia, photography and digital storytelling suit his learning styles. On commencing a blog, he was proud to upload some of this work and would write brief posts when required.
He has quite a few dots on his clustrmap which has increased his motivation and he will reply and thank any people who leave comments on his blogs. (Great for encouraging writing).
Last week he asked if he could add a post that he had written for English and I said "of course". Later, I thought I should have checked it. This week, students were asked to write about their clustr maps. Teachers from overseas wrote comments back saying that they also liked having feedjit on their blogs as they could tell exactly where people had come from and often why. So, Nat added the widget to his blog.
In class yesterday, Nat came to me quite excited that he had a dot from France and when he checked his feed, found that someone had googled Nestles and had hit his site with that search. Here is a student who struggles to write, almost being seen as an 'expert'.Words cannot express the motivation that this provides for students by giving them an authentic audience. This should inspire Nat to continue writing posts and write to the very best of his ability.