Sunday, March 14, 2010




THREE WAYS BLOGS CAN BE USED IN THE CLASSROOM




1.) Children can use it as a support network socially as a part of a community networking idea in class. Children can post blogs about questions they are having
in general with growing pains and life, then spur a discussion on the issues amongst their classmates. The teacher would need to set this up in the classroom with firm guidelines and boundaries. Teachers would also need to remind students that a class blog is a safezone and their peers must be treated with respect and empathy. Subjects would have to be appropriate and students would need to be reminded that adults are monitoring this interaction. But children, especially adolescents, sometimes need to be heard by peers that can relate and understand. this could be a great way to seek support and learn to be a supporter in a classroom, community environment.



2.) It would be a great way to post a poetry or story writing assignment, to where the students would have to post a poem or story, then also read a certain number of their peer's assignments and comment on them. In the state standards for the elemen
tary grades one of the standard goals is to get children to comment on different art forms and be able to express themselves through different creative arts as well. This would be a great venue and media outlet to support those goals.



3.) The thought of having a teacher post a research assignment for any subject class and have the students do research and post their findings and list their resources on a blog came across my mind. Then I could see the teacher pulling together the research facts and discussing them in a wrap up on a final blog. This could be opened up as a collaborative effort between two different classrooms, schools, or school collaboration from another country. It would be interesting to see the results.



3 comments:

  1. I love your ideas about using a blog for poetry and having classmates comment on each others work. Sometimes, it is easier for students to express their opinions in writing vs. having to speak about their peers work in class. I love the idea of getting them used to social networking online at such an early age!

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  2. Thank you Jessi! I used to work residential care with troubled kids and we used to do a similar technique only with composition books. It really helped the kids to be able to work through their communication problems, and we began to see an increase in verbal expression after beginning the treatment group.

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  3. I really love the idea of using the blog to conduct a research project. the best part of a blog is that it is a permanent record. You can really see and show progress of a student an their writing ability over the course of a year.

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