Thank-you for taking the time to read my blog! I am new to blogging, so I hope that I can keep you interested throughout my posts! If you haven’t already done so, I encourage you to visit my ABOUT ME page to learn a little bit about my background before I begin this week's blog!
I always say that I am so fortunate to be heading into a career that I am so excited and passionate about. With that being said, Education is also a very intimidating career to be pursuing right now. All of our education classes are trying to prepare us for the overwhelming amount of material that we will be expected to juggle in our first few years out of the “safety net” of University practicums. One of the biggest stresses for teachers is learning all the new technology and then finding ways to make it useful in the classroom! This is why I decided to sign up for the Web-Based learning course that I am writing this blog for. It has become obvious to me that technology is the one thing that is rapidly transforming our classrooms right now, and I sure don’t want to be the teacher left behind! Our topic this week was to explore blogging and to begin thinking about how blogging could be used as a tool in our own classrooms.
One article that I found really interesting was the article about “33 ways to use blogs in your classroom” because it showcased ways to use blogs for everything from communicating with parents to specific ways to use them in each core subject. I also enjoyed reading one teachers blog about “6 reasons why you should start a classroom blog” and “20 ideas for solid student blogging”. All of these articles are trying to create an awareness of the endless possibilities that blogging can inspire. Most of these articles also seemed like elaborations on the information about student blogging that I heard about during a teaching convention last year. The potential advantages that were brought up during the “Meaningful Blogging” session really opened my eyes to the possibilities of blogging that I had previously been so oblivious about. I’d like to take the time to share some of the realizations that I learned during that session.
1. Blogging is a great way to motivate kids to WANT to write, they get excited to have their work out there in the real world instead of their hard work only being viewed by the teacher.
2. It is more fun for them than just pulling out their pens and paper – it is a hook!
3. Teachers using sites like Kidblog and Edublog usually have the options to fully control what comments and posts are being published going out AND coming in so that nothing harsh or inappropriate can be seen. Also, many of those sites have options to do private comments that only the author can read so that teachers can still give feedback or grades in private. If they choose to improve on their post's grade,
they can edit it easily and resubmit it!
4. Motivates kids to want to write well and use proper spelling because they know anyone can read that post, and kids will sometimes comment on a spelling mistake which makes kids
actually proof read before submitting it! (It doesn't make the teacher the "bad guy" for telling them that they need to improve their spelling!)
5. It opens up the walls of the classroom and gives students the option to comment and hear responses from diverse groups.
6. Gives a chance to teach about internet etiquette and possible dangers so that they are familiar with good online habits at a young age.
7. It improves their typing skills which is going to be one of the most crucial skills for them to have in their generation. Plus, they can see how their typing has improved by looking
back at older posts and seeing how little they could type in a given time at the beginning of the year versus later on.
8. Posting your class blog on twitter with hashtags such as #comments4kids, #globalclassroom etc. increases your chances of having relevant people find your blog to leave comments on them.
So, what types of things can you do through a blog? Here are a few of my favorite possibilities.
1. Having a way to share work with parents/ grandparents who don’t get to see their child’s work all the time. OR to communicate with important dates to remember, or homework, etc.
2. To submit voice recordings or oral responses to a project. Eg. A journal response to how a story made you feel, an animation based on a character from a novel, a prediction about what you think will happen next in a story.
3. To record links to other online projects they have done such as a blabberized animal, a glogster poster, a video they liked, or an educational game they found that helped them to
understand a certain topic better.
4. To interact with the global community through events such as Global Read Aloud, 100 Word challenge, global landmark challenges, global Christmas challenges, and digital learning centers.
5. To find social articles and respond to them
6. To ask questions that they want to find the answers to – for example, you always have those “curious” students who just want to know SO much about an interesting topic and ask lots of questions, what if you asked them to do some research and post what they found on their blog? Or to put the question out there and see if anyone reading the blog can elaborate on that question?
7. To write a story outline that they have – especially if they are stuck on what direction it is going – and have kids comment back on possible plot twists that might help it out.
8. Creating a blog where students find and report on acts of "good" in their community to counter the bombardment of negativity of daily media (33 ways to use blogs)
The options are literally endless! I really wanted to start a blog in one of my practicums, but other factors limited me from being able to start one. However, what I DID do was get my students to record their animal research projects on blabberize.com and then I uploaded them to our class website so that they could show their parents at home. The results were fantastic. Even the reluctant readers were excited to record their own research, and I could still assess their oral reading without having to embarrass them in front of the whole class. They loved getting to hear their own performance on the Smartboard! Seeing the success of this project makes me strive to try more and more of these technology-based tools in my own
classroom… but check them out HERE and see for yourself!
Thanks for reading my first post! (I apologize for the length!)