I have two ideas for a final project, both involving blogging and are similarly related. First, a little background:

I am in charge of a small learning community (the Academy of Finance) at my school made up of about 60 11th and 12th graders. The entire group of students do different events together throughout the two years in the program. Each student goes on a job shadow to a local business twice a year, and each student is offered the ability to complete an internship after their 11th grade year. Now for my two ideas:

1.  In theory, by the end of their senior year, the students will have completed four job shadows by visiting sites. Many of these job shadows we use over and over each semester. I was thinking of setting up a blog as a space to discuss the job shadows students have been on. I could do this in one of two ways: a)set up a blog for each student where they would write about each of their job shadow experiences, or b)set up a blog for each place of business where job shadows are held, and require the students to enter in a blog entry after visiting one of the sites.
Either way, the information would be linked to the Academy web site so when the time comes for students to select which job shadow they would like to go to, they have a resource to go to and learn about the company, what their fellow classmates actually did on the job shadow and their opinion of the experience.

2.  This idea is similar, though deals with the internship experiences rather than the job shadows. Currently, I meet once a week with the students who are interning (16 this summer) and have them journalize their company’s information, their responsibilities, and weekly experiences throughout the internships. They type up this information and either email this to me or print it out to turn in. At the end of the internship commitment, students compile an essay from these journal entries encapturing their entire experience to share with others and as a portfolio piece for their required senior exhibition presentations. I am thinking that I could have each student start an individual blog where they would record their journal entries throughout the experience and then write their final essay based on the compilation of their blog entries.
Students who will be interning the following year will have access to these blogs via the Academy web site in order to see what internships they want to interview for, based on the experiences written by the previous year(s) intern.

I do realize I need to make this more interactive though, with others providing feedback more regularly. I am thinking the job shadow blog would be good for this, possibly set up by the business, and that way each semester at least 2-4 students are visiting the site and writing about it in the blog. Additionally, I could have an intern write into it at the end of their internship experience if it is a job shadow site as well.