Traveling Through the Lens of a Blog

Published December 19, 2014

Travel along with the newly created World Geography and Content reading class at Fairview High School. Students have worked all semester long on developing reading, writing and analytical skills through the lens of geography. They recently presented their final projects for the semester: travel blogs.

“Jessica Clouse and I used an assignment from Matt Hoek at Summit High School and tweaked it to incorporate all of the components that we have focused on during the semester,” said Fairview High School Teacher Lisa Schwartz. “The result was to have students write a travel blog as if they were actually traveling and writing about their adventures as a personal narrative, while including three components of geography: political, physical and human.

The project encompassed four weeks, and since the class is composed primarily of freshman, it was segmented into four distinct deadlines to help them learn to manage a large-scale project.

The students were encouraged to be as creative as they wanted and to make sure they developed a purpose for why they were traveling. They were also asked to insert graphics to help their reader “see” what they saw and to use a blog theme that would be visually appealing.

“Many of our students rose to the challenge with incredible products,” said Schwartz.