I would like to use my blog in my classroom as a tool for my class to communicate with other students. Students could use the read/write web as a way to share ideas on a common unit or theme with other students from around the globe. Providing students the opportunity to share information with a world wide audience could have tremendous learning power for students in the 21st century.
From what I have recently learned blogs serve a vast array of learning purposes from improving the technical aspects of writing to critical thinking about the world around them.
A good blog could showcase polished pieces of writing that students wish to share with an audience that extends to the farthest reaches of one's imagination. A good blog could also serve the purpose of storing information and written work. As stated in this weeks reading teachers have been able to incorporate a variety of outside sources to share and comment on the content of a web page. It would also serve as a great place for teachers to find, share, and express new ideas.
Blogging can truly bring a lesson to life. Being able to interact with all that is readily available on the Internet; incorporating pictures, video clips, speeches from the past, and the list goes on and on. I believe it would also play a role in improving student writing because they now realize how many people would have access to their content, even if it was just classmates.
I am a teacher of English at the 9th and 10th grade level at Lapeer West High School in Lapeer, MI. My rational for teaching with a blog not only introduces studetns to an element of technology that is here to stay, it also is a way to contibute knowledge for others to analyze. The ability to archive and in turn quickly retrieve student work for the sake of reflection and rethinking will greatly enhance student learning and teacher development. But this is just the tip of the ice berg, the opportunities seem quite limitless.
A Blog of My Own
12 years ago
Great minds of English teachers must think alike. Before reading your blog post, I also posted a similar idea on how to use blogs in the classroom. I think students would find it extremely interesting to discover other students view points on the same topic. During my student teaching I taught in an inner city school district with a large student population and then a few months later taught in a school where the entire district of students K-12 amounted to one grade level of students in the first school. I taught different age levels so I was not able to experiment with teaching the same materials, but I would imagine that even though only about 60 miles or so separated these students, they would have different personal responses to the novels I taught. Connecting these students would be a great way to allow students to appreciate text from different view points. This could also evoke extremely different personal responses and heightening discussion more than it could be in the classroom.
ReplyDeleteI do not think that classroom discussion should be eliminated, however, I think to get students familiar with blogging, classroom blogs should be started allowing students to interact with each other. This would be teaching differently, changing up the classroom style currently being used and now providing every student with a voice in a new way. It would then be the job of the educator to take it a step further, contact other educators to design and structure an appropriate plan to further student interaction using weblogs. I say appropriate because “Weblogs are not built on static chunks of content. Instead, they are comprised of reflections and conversations that in many cases are updated every day.” It would not be useful to have inactive blogs, creating these static chunks of content. Proper planning is needed for classroom blogging and I hope that this class gives us a good start.
Richardson, W. (2009). Blogs, wiks, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.
Joe,
ReplyDeleteI like the idea for collecting and showcasing writing. I'm still learning about blogs, but is there a way for students to post or attach files to a blog so that they can post pieces of writing such as a persuasive paper, an editorial, or a short story in its original form? Or does everything have to be bost as the blog, rather than the paper itself?
I think that this area is ripe with possibilities. I look forward to following your process and taking the journey with you!
Debb
Joe,
ReplyDeleteI would require blogging in my classroom if I decided on a specific project, let's say the outside reading. For example, I would have all the kids read The Grapes of Wrath, and then they would be required to blog 3 days a week on the novel. They could talk about something they learned or something they were confused about. I would give them theme-based questions and as I told Debb, I would stick to the curriculum and standards of course.
I am so new at this blogging, so I have not even gotten my feet wet as of yet. I don't know if can make kids blog publicaly, but if it was an assignment that was going to be graded, I don't think it would be a problem.