Field Study and Literacy

My field study will be incorporating lots of the theory around literacy and how it has shifted.  With the use of a classroom blog for students to post upon for me to give feedback and increase my use of formative assessment in my teaching and planning, there will be more writing by the students.
I'm looking at using the blog to have students share their thinking, successes, challenges, and learning within the classroom each week.   In order to do this, students will need to respond to a prompt from me on heir own blog page.
As for literacy through reading, today, we used the Nelson Literacy series and read a text passage about the origin of Canadian Place Names.  We summarized the main ideas together on the board, and then followed that up in our lab class later in the day.   In the lab, we used the internet to read about the origin of some Canadian place names.   I had all students go to the same site; geonames.nrca.gc.ca/education; and then they could choose where to read about a province or city in Canada.   After that, they were to begin posting a summary of what they read onto their own blog page.