I’ve been struggling with how to integrate the weblog into my Lit class, but today I spent a little more time with Dreamcatcher and I think I have an idea brewing. I love the concept of my students building a “Study Guide” for the novels we teach. Here is the basic framework for what they are doing. I’m thinking of creating a weblog for each book, making all the students members, giving them individual topics to post on, and perhaps doing chapter summaries and reactions collaboratively. What if one student did the chapter summary/explication, then other students were able to add comments and other points of view. Could even have one student post summaries of class discussions. Maybe some students could post research about different aspects of the stories. What we would build is a developing resource for the novel and its study.
It might also be interesting to let the kids decide the structure, create the rubrics for assessing the information. More on this later, I’m sure.
Now this is a great idea with all kinds of possibilities for spin offs….what, for example, about having a weblog specifically dealing with methods of teaching children to produce the /s/ sound (remember, I’m a speech pathologist/professor teaching students how to be speech pathologists) and various students could provide information, based on their own research about the different methods, etc.? What about, for example, a weblog to present various case studies and conversations take place around these case studies and are easily archived and reviewed?
I love to see ideas sprouting!