In grading your first assignments I noticed that many of you created blogs to use with your students and the issues that were discussed have led me to write a bit more about blogging. First of all, I noticed several of you talked about having your students create their own blogs and I think this is a great idea. One issue with this is that you would want to make sure you, or some other adult, was moderating the individual student blogs to ensure that no inappropriate comments were posted. Having to moderate 25 different student blogs seems like an overwhelming task so one idea I had was that the parents could be put in charge of moderating their child's blog. I realize that some, or maybe many, parents wouldn't want to take the time or might not have easy access to a computer but it would be an option worth exploring at least. It would be a great way to help parents keep connected to the learning experience and promote communication between the classroom and home. It would also help introduce parents to blogging.
Another think I noticed is that many of you are planning on having students answer questions of the week or other similar type prompts in order to assess student learning and understanding. This is a great idea but the one problem I see is that students will be able to read each others' comments before they post. Therefore, if I don't know the answer I can just wait until someone else answers and then rephrase their answer to make my response. One way around this is through comment moderation. You can read all the comments as students submit them but wait to approve and publish the comments until everyone has responded. That way, no one can read the other comments until they have already commented themselves. You would want to set a due date and time by which students would have to comment so that you weren't waiting to publish the comments for an extended period of time.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
This was one of concerns too that students may copy of others' comments.It's a good idea to hold on to the responses till all the comments are in and then publish them.
Thanks.
I think the idea of moderating all entries before the students can see other responses is a great idea. However, I find that some students need to see "an example" before they actually start responding to make sure they are on the right track. One option for this problem is to only post open-ended opinion questions. This way students can have the same opinion, but they won't be able to state or defend their opinion like anyone else because there will not be a clear, cut answer.
I like the idea of waiting for all students to submit their responses. I also thought of another way to overcome the challenge of access and/or lack of resources... I have an overhead TV screen that is attached to the computer so I can project the blog. This way, if students cannot post comments (due to lack of computer time or not owning a personal computer), they could simply journal their responses and turn those in. I could either type them as they come in, or post the written responses on a bulletin board dedicated to the blog.
I'm really excited about trying out my blog for the first time this coming year. However, I'm curious as to how many parents and students will use this from home. I don't quite know what to expect. I guess I see 50 percent of the students maybe using it from home. I'm affraid that if students and parents don't care about using the blog, I'm not going to care, and the blog doesn't get updated as much. I have also thought about setting up a PTO blog to help spread the word about PTO events. We are starting to lose parent volunteers, we need more!
Post a Comment