Over the past two weeks, my students and I have been working on the following two goals:
1. Promote student reflection using collaborative, digital tools to reveal and clarify students’ conceptual understanding and thinking, planning, and creative processes.
2. Strengthen collaboration with students and parents through the use of digital tools and resources to support student success and innovation.
These goals were part of my original GAME plan to get students more involved with technology and to communicate more effectively with parents. To do this, I am having student’s complete daily journals that are done through their own personal blog. These blogs are made public so that parents are able to view and comment on them.
For the most part, blogging has been a new concept for my students. We have started with the basics as a whole group and have viewed, commented, and created a blog as a class. This past week, I had students create their own accounts and they have played around with the styles and options on their blog site. After the Thanksgiving holiday, students will make their first online journal post. I will be sending home a hard copy of a newsletter and an electronic copy letting parents know of the change in our daily journaling exercises. Parents will become aware of their child’s URL address and will be encouraged to read and comment on their posts.
Students are quick to adjust to change. I have found that they are very eager to learn about new technologies and find it much more exciting than doing journals by hand. I hope that this excitement carries over to other areas of the curriculum as I plan to continue to integrate more and more types of technologies. There have been many questions and I thank the students for their patience and persistence in discovering the blogging process.
It is my hope that after a week’s worth of blogging, I will have students complete a survey that gives me a glimpse at their thoughts on completing their journals electronically or by hand. After students get used to this process, I hope that they will begin to feel more comfortable with the technology and begin to tune into their creative side, adding more images, changing font styles, and commenting on each of their classmate’s posts.
Wow! You have made a lot of progress on your GAME plan. Having students set up their accounts and learn about online journaling is a big step in meeting your GAME plan. Waiting until the students post their first journal and read through feedback is a smart move. This will allow students some time to evaluate what they liked or did not like. Make sure you leave room for suggestions, too. Children are so creative and can differing viewpoints on what they consider to be necessary. Having students evaluate the site in regards to images, fonts, and colors, also supports national Language Arts standards.
ReplyDeleteWhat grade do you teach? My county does not even allow us to get onto blogs as my school. I have tried to get onto my blog for class as school and it is blocked. That is great that you have gotten this far on your game plan. It sounds like your students are very interested and I am sure they love using the technology!
ReplyDeleteI like your idea of sharing the blog with the parents as well. This connects with my philosophy of teaching Once they are aclimated to the new online environment, they will discover new uses for their blog. It is well that your students are becoming comfortable with your blog site.
ReplyDeleteHow do you handle students who do not have access to the internet at home? Do they post their blogs from school or home? I'm sure that there are a number of parents who are not familiar with blogs. How will you make them feel comfortable using it? What about parents who only speak Spanish?
ReplyDeleteI teach 2nd grade in a small rural town. My students are going to have 20 minutes for journal time a day that they will spend on their blogs. As of right now, this is the only blog integration I plan on doing, until I get a feel for how it goes and the students' attitudes about it. No out of school work is required, however, parents will be encouraged to comment on their child's blog from home. We do not have any families who only speak Spanish, so that is not a concern as of yet. I would assume that on the blog site they could copy and paste their child's blog post into a translator sight where they could understand the writing. It has been a struggle to get the students comfortable with using this technology. However, in the long run, I feel that it will greatly benefit them.
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