Blogging for students
I was following the thread about interesting students in blogging on one of your sites and lost track of which one. It’s something that we all seem to be facing- the challenge of getting our students to try new things. As soon as they are associated with school and learning, they lose their edge. If a friend suggested it, they’d be all over it. So the other day, I book-talked the Diamond Willow books to the grade4/5 class at one of my schools. I put my library blog up on the screen and book-talked as I showed them where to find things and how to place comments. They were thoroughly engaged and many can’t wait to read a book and try it out. That particular teacher is also very willing for me to assign the reading and blog response for at least one Diamond book. So maybe we need to catch them a little younger, when they still are not afraid to be enthusiastic about new things. I think many of us felt that if we presented a technology option, they’d be keen immediately. But like so many things in education, we have to have some patience and I do believe as they see others give it a try, it will catch on. Some of the students are also reading other books that they would like to comment on. so it looks like I will be adding a section for Student Picks. I suggested they give me the title and author of the book they’re reding which I will post so that they can begin to comment.
By the way, have you checked out Tanya’s blog? We have a pro in our midst.
2 Responses to “Blogging for students”
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Hi Jane,
I initiated the discussion on motivating students to participate in blogs about books. I was really pleased to hear other people have had similar experiences and they made great suggestions to try. Like you, I have lined up a grade nine teacher who will have her students read the books silently in class and then respond on my blog to a selection of discussion questions. I will mark responses on a rubric. She was thrilled to have more of purpose to silent reading time and glad to have a new idea to substitute for book reports. Time will tell if I achieve my goals of getting students reading and chatting about their reading.
I have enjoyed looking at your visual representations for Keturah and Lord Death. It’s one of the Snows I haven’t gotten to yet. Hopefully this weekend! Like you I feel that I had to join a lot of sites, make a lot of user names and passwords. It was quite a process. I’m not sure how much of it I would actually do with students. For example, I don’t think I would do the vocabulary exercise with students loading pictures of themselves onto Flickr. I’m not comfortable with photos that I have required them to do being out there in the public domain. I guess the reason I was so comfortable with Blackboard through SaskLearning was that it was all password protected – only people you gave passwords to could get in – students, family, etc. I realize some people want students to have the experience of having their work out on the WWW to have a large audience. Unfortunately we’ve had some bad experiences at my school with Facebook and some other sites. I am also concerned that students in order to use many of these fun webtools have to open accounts and give out email addresses. I don’t want to worry unnecessarily or be a ludite but I think I will run my project by system technology support person before I get in too deep.
Thanks for sharing your ideas and visuals. Now I’m off to see Tanya’s as you suggest!
Chris
Hi Chris
I think one of the most valuable parts of this whole process is bouncing ideas off each other. I like your idea of having particular questions for students to respond to. The one response I’ve had on my library blog was rather brief. Not that I want their responses on their leisure reading books to be onerous, but I do want to encourage a little more thoughtful responses. But as an assignment, it does require more of a goal in order to be assessed. I like your idea of a rubric for evaluating as well- I’ll have to work on that.
Like you, I doubt that I would expect students to use many of these sites in their work. Their main value for me has been to explore what is out there and hopefully use some of the ideas in an attempt to promote books on another level. The visuals were fun to work on, but pretty time-consuming. Hopefully, we’ll find some that work for us and suit our styles.
Thanks for your comment.
Jane