As a second grade teacher, most of my students are still learning to read and write - let alone use technology indepedently. I began to throw around some ideas on how to incorporate blogs in the classroom.
The first is simply a communication tool between parents and teacher. I work at a school with very active and vocal parents. They like to stay informed at all times. They also like to have input in the classroom. At my school we are required to send home a friday newsletter each week to inform parents of upcoming events, homework for the following week, and any other classroom news parents should know about. Many times, teachers are rushed on Fridays to get it copied and send it home by the afternoon. Our administration has discussed plans of going "green" and requiring teachers to have a website instead of a newsletter. My idea is to use a blog instead of a newsletter or a website. I can post students work, classroom news, homework, and articles I found interesting for parents to read. The blog is unique because parents have the opportunity to respond, ask questions, and give ideas. The communication lines are now open as compared to the past where I may get five emails asking the same question about a school event or homework assignment.
I can eventually see myself posting podcasts of students reading their published pieces, and sharing videos of science experiments.
If I were teaching an upper elementary grade, I might consider using a blog for reading workshop. Now, students respond to literature in the form of letters to the teacher. How great would it be to have students respond to each other through a blog? Students could ask questions, give comments, and encourage critical thinking.
These are just my first initial thoughts for a blog. Right now, they are just ways for "doing things differently" instead of "doing different things". I hope as I get more comfortable with blogs and wikis, I will come up with more ways of incorporating them into my classroom.
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Great Idea Ashley! I would like to see education go entirely green. Our population is 95% online and the rest is not. I do not know how a district makes that call to move everything into the information age. What would those without access do? I am glad I am not making the decisions, Ha.
ReplyDeleteJeff
Sounds like you have several great ideas Ashley. Maybe you could send an electronic copy to everone that has Internet access at home and make copies for those that do not. You would still need to make copies, but not nearly as many and you would be saving a lot of paper. Good Luck. Hope it goes well for you
ReplyDeleteUsing blog with your students may be very hard but would be a great way to communicate with students. With the information being available 24 hours a day it would help you communicate with them. This will help engage parents who may work many different hours. They can keep up to date with classwork at 3 am or 7 pm. That is the great thing of the blog.
ReplyDeleteJeffrey, something we do to determine if parents can receive information online is send out a little questionaire during registration. This is simply a check-list. One of the questions ask if they have daily internet access. If they answer no, then we print everything for them. This also helps when assigning projects for the students because we know who is going to need extra time during the school day to use the web.
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