Blogging has the ability to function in many ways within a classroom. Last year, I created a website for my sixth grade classroom and was able to actually get my feet wet blogging with my students. If you’re curious about it you’re welcome to check it out: Ms Constantine's Website
I mainly created the blog for my homeroom students to have somewhere to discuss and interact with topics and themes we were reading about during language arts class. However, it quickly turned into a current events blog for my three social studies classes, which seemed to go rather well for a while.
During the time I began the blog, Egypt was going through its government crisis. I thought, what better way to discuss Ancient Egypt in my classes than to have them connect what they are learning in the classroom to real life events in Egypt. Many students took on an active role in reading the articles I had chosen and responding with their thoughts and questions.
What I found unfortunate was there were some students who did not participate, mainly because they did not have internet access at home. Due to this, I allowed participation on the blog as extra credit. Some students used their time in the media center to log on and some went to the public library. I was beginning to notice that there were a couple of students who were incredibly engaged in online conversation and I was seeing a spark in their learning that I had not seen in a very long time. Unfortunately, we were so wrapped up in standardized testing that we stopped blogging.
I hope, in the future, I will be able to manage blogging much more effectively. As I am going through my classes for my master’s degree, I am learning so much about including technology into my lessons. Blogging is such an important skill for our students to learn about, especially since they will be using it for the rest of their lives.
Hey Stacy, I love your website and was very interested in your blogging rules page. I hope you don't mind if I borrow some of those rules for my own blog. One of my biggest concerns with blogging is how open it can be. What have you done to protect yourself, besides your rules? I noticed that Vernon from our class had to approve the comment I attempted to post. Do you use this too with your students? I guess I will find out soon if you do it here when I attempt to post this comment.
ReplyDeleteQuestion: Once you made your blogging assignment an extra credit assignment, did you still have many kids blogging?
I teach at an alternative high school for credit deficit students. I'd like to use blogs next year for my business classes and have parent involvement too. Do you have any advice and to know what you think the pros and cons have been.
Great question Fred - I also had that concern when I created my classroom blog initially. For my class, I do approve their comments before they are posted to the blog. It can be a hassle at times because of how often some of them actually post, but I did realize how often some of my students were posting just silly comments. Once the students realized that I was not going to post anything that they wrote that was unrelated to the topic, they started to really take it seriously and we had some great discussion going.
ReplyDeleteWith the extra credit assignment, I definitely still had students blogging. At the end of every class, I would mention who the top bloggers were and the students would start posting more often.
I think creating a blog was a wonderful idea to communicate with my students and to have them discuss topics outside of the classroom. Weebly.com was a very easy site to work with and allowed me to have a website on top of the blogs. My only suggestions are to really teach them how to respond to a blog and to moderate all comments going through. Otherwise, enjoy the discussion that your students will create!