I am currently teaching K-8 students in an afterschool setting focused primarily on reading, writing, and math. A blog could be used in my classroom to communicate important announcements as well as to interact with students about the content they are learning or producing in the classroom.
In writing, a great way to use the blog would be for peer revising and editing. Often, when students get to the revising and editing stage of a paragraph, essay, narrative, or other types of writing, they struggle because they recognize that something needs to be changed, but cannot put their finger on it. They become too dependent on the teacher to revise or edit for them. If students can post their “rough drafts” to a blog, then other students can comment and offer feedback and suggestions to improve the piece of writing. This also takes a lot of pressure off of the teacher to feel like they need to be the one giving all of the feedback to the students. As a teacher, my job would then be to facilitate the revising and editing rather than to tell them specifically what students should revise and edit. In addition, I could post a grammar question of the day for students to correct and post in their comments. This would be especially helpful for younger students who are just beginning to develop structuring sentences.
In math, there is a movement toward constructed response questions being used on state assessments. I could use the blog as a spring board for conversation with my students by posting a question of the day and asking students to respond. This could be integrated with the writing posts as students could give feedback on specific vocabulary their peers are using to answer the question and offer suggestions as to how to clarify their explanations. For younger students, the math could simply be another question of the day.
In reading, students could share their thoughts and ideas about the books or stories they are reading. In addition, I think students could do an author study and build a database of links to information about their favorite authors. I have had a student compare and contrast two or more authors in the past. For example, one student chose to write and compare and contrast essay of “The Chronicles of Narnia” and “The Lord of the Rings” especially since the authors of both series were connected in real life. In addition, I primarily work on specific reading skills in the after school setting such as being able to identify main idea, using context clues, or reading techniques such as skimming or scanning. I think I could use a blog to show examples of each technique and allow my students to practice.
What about you? Where have you successfully implemented blogs into your classroom? What difficulties do you foresee in using a blog in any of these ways? What safety precautions have you taken with your students addressing internet safety?
I admit, I struggled the most with ideas for reading and math, so any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
Whitney,
ReplyDeleteI, too, am new to blogging so it was great to hear from someone who is in the same position as me. First off, I love your ideas for each subject area. What a challenge it must be to reach students in such a wide range of abilities.
I have some general questions to ask to help understand where you are coming from. How many students do you have altogether? How many students do you have per grade level? Are these activities targeted towards certain grades? I wonder what the appropriate age is to begin blogging. I am assuming your kindergartners would not be be participating in these activities. Would students be working on these activities with you after school or at home? Do you have access to enough computers after school? Sorry for all of the questions! I hope you don't mind answering them for me!
For Language Arts, I love the idea of students working together to peer edit. Is each student going to create their own blog where they will post their writing pieces or will all students post them to your class blog? A challenge for you might be to get students to post helpful and accurate editing advice. A suggestion to help with this is to provide students with an editing checklist. Also, you can introduce students to websites such as dictionary.com to help with spelling and word meanings. Another resource you can consider is an online thesaurus. I am working on having my fifth graders make stronger word choices in their writing. I explain to them that by fifth grade, they should not be using words like: said, bad, good, sad, talk, walk, etc. I encourage students to choose stronger vocabulary words to enhance their writing. I am sure that your students would like to use an online resource like http://freethesaurus.net/ to help their classmates.
For math, I am unclear on the short constructed response for the testing. On our math testing, students can draw pictures, use numbers, or use words to represent how they solved the problem. For your state testing, do your students have to write in complete sentences or can they draw pictures to show their work? If students are not required to write sentences, it may be difficult for them to show their work on a blog using pictures. Maybe you can use another resource for showing their work. I know their are applications for the iPad where students can draw, but then I don't know how they would publish them to a blog. Maybe for math, your students could create a textbook with all of their math vocabulary. I know my students struggle with vocabulary. If your students created a blog with their vocabulary words, maybe that would help them with the standardized testing.
For reading, I love both of your ideas! A challenge that might arise is having your students find reliable sources of information about the author. You would probably have to model and explicitly show students how to determine if the website is reliable. I like how you said that students could share ideas about the books they are reading. To take it even further, if students are reading the same books, you can create inferential discussion questions. Students can post their opinions with text support and debate with their classmates about what they think.
I have not started using blogs with my students yet, but I am hoping to start in the next couple of weeks. My first project is to type up a letter to send home to the parents about our blogging project. I would like to have my blog set up before our school's spring break. I am nervous about the parents' responses and if students will use it appropriately. However, I think with the right guidance and explanations, I think my students will enjoy blogging and learn from it.
Good Luck! I hope to hear back from you soon! How exciting it must be to get your first comment on your first blog!
So I meant to respond to this earlier, but I did not. I apologize. I read it a lot earlier in the week and then got side tracked when I went to respond and just realized I never responded.
DeleteI actually work for an after school tutoring company as one of the directors. That being said, I have anywhere from 60-100 students at any given time I am responsible for monitoring their progress and making decisions regarding their instruction. In addition, of those students involved in the center I teach about 44 of them for an hour to two hours at time twice a week in reading, writing, and math. In reality I tutor 3-8 kids at one time but they are not grouped according to grade level or subject. Therefore, it is hard to tell you exactly how many I have in each grade level which may make using Blogs difficult. We do have access to enough computers for every child to be using one at the same time regardless of who is teaching them.
Thank you for your input. In math, the constructed response is new to everyone, but my understanding is they have to show their work and explain how they got the answer in words. I love your idea about using math vocabulary as a starting place. I realize I would have to do a lot of modeling regardless. As I was looking over this post, I realized that maybe I am trying to tackle too much at once, and need to start smaller. Maybe I would need to start with just adding announcements to the page or posting a question of the day. We use a Facebook page now, but it is hard to get parents to check that page regularly.
I am also new to blogging, but I think your ideas sound good. The one thing that really stuck out to me was making sure the students were accurate in their evaluations of each others work. I wonder if some type of rubric might help the students as they edit each others work. May be you could have particular things to look for each time. That might make it easier for you to check for accuaracy.
ReplyDeleteI have an editing checklist my students use with revising and editing now, but they still need a lot of guidance of course. I like the idea of using a rubric to provide specific examples. I also try to model the process for my students as much as I can. I am sure if I did use a blog for revising and editing, we may have to do some "mock" posting so students can see what I expect of them and to model the process. Another idea I had would be to partner with another class, even if they were a class from an older grade level, to provide some peer mentoring.
DeleteI really like your idea of posting rough drafts and asking for student revising responses! That sounds like a great idea for student to get suggestions. It really helps train students to get help from others and not just the teacher! I would think you would have to do a lot of training on commenting respectively and meaningfully. Younger students seem to struggle with this quite a bit! Good idea with "mock" postings and older students to help!
ReplyDeleteAnother idea, keeping it simple, could just be to start a posting about book reviews. Students could write a short post about a great book they have read. Others could get interested in new books because of posting they read.
Megan,
ReplyDeleteGreat idea about asking students to write a short post about a book they have read! I could even tie that into writing and language arts.