Step 4: Quality Commenting (ll)

 Teaching Quality Commenting Skills
   If commenting skills are not taught and constantly reinforced, there can be a tendency for students to limit their comments to thing like: “ I like your blog”, or  “ Cool!!!”, “ Awsom! ( Awesome! “).
While enthusiasm is high with these sorts of comments, students are not developing their literacy skills or having meaningful interactions with other members of the blogging community. Conversations in the comment section of a blog are such rich and meaningful learning experiences for students.Conversations begin with high quality comments. Blogging is an authentic avenue for developing students literacy skills, when you invest your time in teaching, modeling, revising, and promoting high quality writing of comments, students can make great gains in their overall literacy development. Set your standards high from the start and reap the rewards!
 Developing strong commenting skills also provides a good foundation for when you move students on to writing posts on the class blog or their own student blogs.Quality Commenting
How to teach quality commenting skills
  In her post on commenting, Kathleen Morris shares eight ideas to encourage a culture of quality commenting:

1. Blogging guidelines: Set high standards to ensure students are using correct writing conventions and practicing things like questions, staying on topic, making connections, and complimenting in a specific way, etc.
2. Be consistent: Consider spending a couple of minutes each day or a few times a week focusing on commenting as a whole class. Embed blogging into your routine!
3. Use mini lessons: You can embed on-the-spot commenting tutorials into whole class blogging time. You might choose a comment to reply to as a class.
4. Use explicit lessons: Come up with a few more detailed lessons on commenting.
5. Integrate: When you use literacy lessons to teach various conventions, like letter writing, editing, grammar, spelling, punctuation,etc., have students practice these concepts through commenting.
6. Involve parents: Family parents have the potential to be regular commenters on your class blog. We need to bring this potential to life.
7. Connecting with others : There are so many ways you can connect with other classes around the world to create authentic opportunities for both writing and receiving comments.
8. Ending with a question: A question at the end of the blog post is an invitation to comment.