Review the various blogging platforms suggested in this workshop's readings and learning activities.
Create a 350- to 700-word blog for classroom purposes. Include the following in your blog:
I keep a professional blog about things that interest me and things that might interest my students and their parents. In the past this has included my thoughts on assignments, teaching at different grade levels, cursive writing vs. keyboarding skills, and more. Now I'm including my school assignments! I advertise my new blog posts via Twitter to increase readership, but that number is still a little too low for my liking. The blog serves a purpose in my classroom- I try to engage the students and their parents in my thought process, as scary as that may be. I want them to know that sometimes a plan that I have falls apart or an idea that worked out really well. I believe that it's important for students to know that we make mistakes as well and that we think about how to correct them. It's a pathway to success to understand your weaknesses and then work on them. It fosters hard work and metacognition. It transforms errors into opportunities rather than end-of-the-world failures. This is turn helps to create a positive classroom atmosphere. Likewise, it is not a far jump, or even a change in the purpose of my blog, to use it as a direct tool for discussion in my classroom. If my ultimate goal is to connect with other professionals in education, opening up my classroom to them achieves that purpose as well. In my classroom I have the students use Blogger, partially because of the ease in which it connects with their school accounts. It is also a fast and easy way to create a blog and easily build up a readership for the students within their own learning communities. I know first hand that taking the time to write something and express your thoughts is daunting, and frustrating when no one sees it! Next year my goal is to incorporate blogging into a novel study by connecting with another class in a different part of the world. One of the novels takes place in India and another in Alaska. This would be an awesome opportunity for my students to be able to ask questions of the different cultures! Following that, students will be required to write comments and respond to their readers in away to engage their audience. The responses do not need to be outrageously long, especially for 6th grade students,but 150 words is not out of the question. I'm aiming for frequency of use more than one long drawn out response because I believe that the engagement and excitement will be kept higher, and the frequency of the responses will keep the blogging feeling fresh. I will also link in my blogs the social media of whichever organization or person is relevant to the discussion. This is authentic, and will help bring the outside world in.
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
Mr. HopperArchives
December 2018
|