I know that I have not blogged since, well, the beginning of the school year. It seems that I have been just so busy with teaching that it is difficult to find time to blog. I knew this was going to become an excuse, but I hope to not use it anymore. I think one other reason why I didn't like blogging was because Blogger doesn't allow you to switch between your Gmail accounts easily, so I added my main account as an author.
Anyway, I just wanted to share with you what I have been doing in my classroom. As I blogged about in previous posts, we have improved our technology at our school. I have been using our new tech lab to introduce my students to Khan Academy. While I haven't found the best way for my class to use this, they love using it as a tool to learn more about math when they have finished their homework. I have a few students who spend about an hour a day on it at home! I hope to find better ways to implement it within the classroom.
We used the Chromebooks to work on some projects, so students got used to using Google Docs and other tools that Google has to offer. They learned how to share documents and view documents that were shared with them. I am planning on doing some projects that will utilize the sharing of documents and working at the same time, but that will be in the future.
Lastly, today I introduced blogging to my students. Right now, the blog is being used for our literature circles. Currently, students are broken up into groups of 4, and each group is reading a different book based on their reading levels. I started the blogging session off by having them preview the book and answer three questions: What do you think the book will be about? What challenges will the main character face/how will the main character grow? What will you learn from this book?
Once we got passed all the bugs of removing the captchas and giving them a limited blogger profile, they were understanding what they needed to do. I told them that they had to respond to at least one other person in their group. I also mentioned that it is proper to respond to people when they reply to something you have posted. They all did a great job and respond to many people as well as reply to the students who responded to them. I hope that we will be able to use this more effectively as we go throughout this lit circle unit!
The students are graded on their answers to the questions as well as discussing other students' posts. What I would like you to help me answer is this: Should students be graded on their spelling and sentence structure in a blog discussion? Why or why not?
My initial thoughts are that I would like them to practice grammar and proper communication skills. However, many of them are so used to not having to do that when online, texting, e-mailing, etc. Let me know your thoughts or what you have done with your students.
