I personally do not see my school using blogs, because they are elementary school students. But I do believe that blogs would be a great tool to use in middle and high schools. Teachers could set up blogs to use as collaboration between students on class projects and discussions. Students could focus on the 21st century skills of critical thinking and a higher level of thinking through group participation. The students could expand their creativity levels by engaging in class discussions related to class projects.
If I taught up the upper level grades I could see myself posting a discussion topic on blogger, and seeing where my students went with the topic. It would be a great way to hold a classroom discussion. People love to text today, so I do not see why they would not enjoy blogging!
I could use blogs with parents to open another line of communication. I have many parents who e-mail, and by blogging this could be a way to communicate homework assignments, what took place in subject lessons throughout the day, and upcoming projects that need to be done.
There are definitely lots of good ideas here. Think about possibly letting a student post the blog post to parents each week (under your supervision and userID). This would let them feel part of the communication process.
ReplyDeleteThere are other issues with using some of the blog sites with kids. Some restrict access to students over 13 due to privacy issues and some require email addresses to use. We'll look at some options a little later in the semester.
I like the idea of posting an idea and seeing where the students would take it. The thing that I think is important (at least for my students) is that they would need a little training to do this. I am a math teacher and whenever I give my students an open-ended question they tend to freak out because they are so used to not having any "freedom" in math. I would love to see how they would start "talking" about problems and topics.
ReplyDeleteIt's not just math where freedom (or lack there of) is an issue. In one of my other classes we are talking about the problem solving process and how seldom we let students find problems. We tend to be very specific in what we want them to do and don't allow them to search around and struggle to determine what the real problems are. When you think about what industry wants (innovation, creativity), it seems like this is something we are going to have to make a major focus in the future.
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