Three, 3, Tres
Chapter three has several good points- if you aren’t blogging why should your kids be? I think that showing students example of good blogging at the peer level would be more effective than showing them my own. Right now for example my students are all excited about how “tough” people from NYC are. I think that showing them some blogs from students their age in NYC might be a motivational tool to get them reading, thinking, and writing.
I am left wondering if Jefferson County Public Schools have any groups of students that are currently blogging and if so, what site they are currently using. I know as a new teacher we have far more technology programs than I am aware of, thus I am wasting school funds. If anyone has any information on this let me know.
Finally, here is a link { http://questionsforschools.blogspot.com/} to a friend of mine (and Andrew D.) who has both a website and blog called “Questions for Schools.” He is a good example of a Kentucky educator that regularly blogs.
Five, 5, Cinco
I just read about setting up my own RSS and to be quite honest it sounded like a pain and something else to keep up with. It seems like one more thing to check while I am on the internet and get sucked into burning hours more of my life in front of a screen. However, I can see uses for it in my classroom. For example when we were studying our earth science unit in January and February I was constantly searching Google news to see if there was any updates on the volcanic activity of Mount Redoubt. It would have been nice to have had a constant stream of updates throughout the year, particularly as we moved into a new unit and I stopped being as faithful about getting the students updates.
Anyhow, I have decided to be a good sport and sign up for Bloglines. I will let everyone know how my adventure goes.
Seven, 7, Siete
Since we already played with Flicker in class this article was easy to approach, and I felt confident I could conquer this bit of technology. By the same merit since we had already played with it, I didn’t find anything in the article to be groundbreaking. However, when I saw the little girl’s project where she annotated all the different elements of Jane Goodall’s camp I thought of my own unique Flickr use. For labs with complicated set ups, I might be nice to have students who have done a good job take a picture of their set up, then annotate what was where (and perhaps why. It would be a good way for older student to capture the set up of their labs in order to better write a “procedures” section and have a way for people to reference their set up.
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Chlodys, I think you're right. It seems like students would be much more in to blogs of their peers than their teacher's. Especially for middle schoolers where teachers kind of lose their coolness... Last semester, I was somehow surprised that fifth graders weren't interested in the things I was (um- gardening, yoga, cooking, etc-). And then I realized, oh yeah--- they're eleven. So, I hardly thing they would want to read examples of my blogging on all these topics. I can see them getting excited about blogging, though, if I found some good examples from students their age writing about things they cared about.
ReplyDeleteI would also like to put in a plug for the blog that Chlodys mentioned. It raises interesting questions and challenges the status quo of education in today's society.
ReplyDeleteAlways a fan of challenging the status quo. I checked out the blog and like what I see.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you when you say students should not be blogging if their teacher is not. But at the same time when teacher's model blogging, I think they should not show their own but that of their peers. This will give students an idea of how a good student blog should look like. Also, I was also skeptical about the RSS feed. Though it does seem complicated, I think it would be beneficial for research purposes.
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