Blogs are an extremely powerful tool for the classroom as they generate exciting new learning formats. The idea of developing an instructional unit on how to use blogs started about a year ago when a group of teachers from Victoria Magathan Elementary, a school in Southern California, expressed their concerns about the lack of motivation their students had when facing the writing process. In their own words, the fact that students did not have an audience was causing a negative impact in the quality of their writings. After analyzing the condition, causes and symptoms of the situation, I established a main goal for the instruction: All teachers should be able to create and maintain an educational blog. I developed a needs analysis, specifying the target population (all the teachers from 4th to 6th grade) and the strategies for data collection (triangulation based on surveys to teachers, an interview with the principal and observation). After analyzing the data, I confirmed that the instruction was pertinent, achieving important conclusions on how I should adapt it to match the teacher's prior knowledges.
Finally, based on all the information I had, I developed a task analysis with one main goal (our original criterion), three key tasks (set up the blog, manage the blog, and maintain the blog), and different subtasks to be completed.