My first goal of inspiring and facilitating student learning and creativity is coming along great. Students started using blogs tentatively. However, as they gained more confidence they began taking more risks and posting pictures and music with their posts. Also, as students respond to each other and see that their classmates read the blogs they have increasingly wrote with more thought. I have been very pleased with the progress of the blog assignment.
Vicki Davis spoke about using blogs to help with differentiation. This is definitely something I can incorporate into my instructional practice. I love the idea of allowing my students to post videos if they sometimes struggle with the typing. It is definitely something I will try with my students.
I am still working on helping my students with digital responsibility and citizenship. Just this past Monday I had to have a talk with one of my seniors. He swore in his weekly post. Speaking with him, he agreed he would not have swore in class, and he realizes now that he should not have swore in his post as it was for this class. However, he did state that he would have no problems with saying what he said on his Facebook account. I know that this is the mindset of almost all my students and this is something that I need to keep working on with them.
A new goal that I can easily work toward is increasing student communication and collaboration. The more communication between the students in the blogs, the better the blogs have been. I need to devise a way to get students to respond to different classmates' blogs each week. In this way, the blogs are a true extension of the classroom. I want to eliminate cliques in the classroom, but sometimes that is very difficult to accomplish. Any suggestions as to how I can get students to communicate with different people each week?
I think a new approach I can take for this is to ask for student feedback on how I can make the blogs even more effective. They are at the point now where they have a comfort and familiarity where they can offer up suggestions as to how to better use theblogs in the classroom. They can also give input on how to get students to communicate with different people each week.
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Hello Matt,
ReplyDeleteIt appears to me that you are indeed making some great progress with your GAME plan, especially your thoughts about how technology can assist in providing differentiated instruction. I believe that is so crucial to engaging learners, and an engaged learner is a motivated learner. Then you have the ability to focus more on the content than on student management issues. A very real benefit.
Regarding your student who swore on his blog for class, how very typical. I often found that my students did not even realize they are swearing when they were speaking, even conversationally, in the classroom. If your district has an Acceptable Use of Technology policy, I would review that with the student. If your district does not have one, perhaps you would consider creating one just for your courses (or even in addition to the district policy), especially of you intend to integrate more technologies more often in your lessons. It could possibly lead to a conversation about why such policies were created, what is the norm for your classroom, academic work (which is significantly different than social communications, and not just in regard to swearing word choices), and what is beyond just the legalities of the Acceptable Use of Technology policy to the ethics of social discourse. You might also consider making swearing a cause for point deduction on the grade or evaluation of the assignment.
With your question about what can be done to devise a way to get students to respond to different classmates blog’s each week, it seems simple to me to make that a requirements of the assignment, and again, that in not changing who you respond to from week to week until you have gone through the entire class list, would result in a deduction on the evaluation of the lesson. If this is a critical issue for you, devise a rotation system and assign students to respond to certain students each week. That is pretty drastic though, and reduces student choice so it may reduce student engagement entirely.
Please post on what you try, whether it is any of these ideas or something else. I am very interested to hear what works for you and your students.
Have a great week Matt.
Matt,
ReplyDeleteIn order to avoid "the cliques" in blog responses, you could place the students in "blog groups" like we have here at Walden. Then, the students must respond to at least one (or two?) people in their group. They may respond to other students if they wish, but they will only be graded on their responses to their group mates. Would that idea work?
Linda
Matt,
ReplyDeleteI was thinking about your digital citizenship discrepancy. Perhaps we need to introduce our students to the realities of the new, technologically advanced world:
Here is a CBS report about employers using Facebook and Myspace to background check people.
A Mental Floss article about normal people's tweets getting them fired.
And not for the kiddies, but SNL's own opinion of Facebook
I would propose that students read a selection of articles (probably not the SNL skit!) and then see if this helps them change their opinions of personal word choice.
-Becca
Rebecca,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the links! I especially liked the CBS report. That is something I have been stressing with my students early on.
Linda,
I didn't think about grouping them. I could then change their groups each week. That's a great idea. I will see how it works.
Inger,
We do have an Acceptable Use policy and I will go over it with him.