Teaching with Blogs

Teaching with Blogs

This post is based on a phone call that Barb and I had. We discussed the following:

· Scaffolding lessons

· Lessons that she has been doing to get students prepared for the blog

Based on our phone call of October 8, 2006 at 1:00 p.m.

Lessons to scaffold

1. netiquette safety (Barb has a copy).

2. setting up email

3. teacher modeling of blog

4. how to comment

5. choosing a name

6. reading territories

7. 10-20 things about myself

8. print a couple of last year’s posts—ask them to comment—pass it around and comment

We’ll have students create a rubric.

Barb will set up once or twice a week to blog, and she will comment on five students posts—randomly and rotating. What will those blogs consist of? Encouraging? Or deeper? Describe to the students how you will comment.

Send home something at the end of the semester so the parents can reflect.

The week of October 2-6 Barb mentioned to the students every day that they would start blogging the next week. On October 9, 2006, Barb will be able to get out of her wheelchair.

On October 5, Barb had parent teacher conferences. She gave to them a printed out copy of her blog that she created while she was out. She also gave them the link to the blog and invited them to read along with her personal classroom web log. Parents were wowed by the blog and noted that it was personal. She included pictures of her cat and pictures of herself in the wheelchair. She told the parents that she wanted the students to get to know her while she was gone. Although she discovered that the sub was not showing the students the blog every day.

Even when she returned she mentioned the blog each day in class. Each day she would ask them in class about her blog. What did she post about? This created some curiosity and more students would check to see what she was writing about.

We decided today and based on the suggestion from my committee that we would create three weblogs, one for each class.

She sent them on a scavenger hunt. She asked them to find click on links that she had provided, comments she had made, find dates and titles of posts. One student found the ALA website. He said, “I had no idea you could look up summaries of books on the internet.” She is planning on doing a second scavenger hunt.

She did say she had a wide variety of abilities. Some students were tying to get on MySpace at school.