Came across a couple more examples of teachers blogging with their students that look pretty interesting. First is this e-book of a Tapped-in presentation by Barbara Dieu who is a teacher in Sao Paulo, Brazil. I like how she introduces her project on her own site:
So as many of you are about to embark on the adventure of creating a web page or using a blog…here are some questions for you to consider: Does the architecture of the environement online (blog, web page, wiki, message board) affect your stds’ motivation and the way they learn, communicate, interact? Will a page with text only make students read more and pay more attention to the text ? What kind of balance should there be between design/layout and content online?
Good stuff. One quick thing I realized in going through her workshop site was that Blogger now has a notification piece built in. Did it always have that? Seems like a lifetime ago…
Also got an e-mail from Scott Rogers who is blogging with his Freshman Composition students at Weber State in Michigan. The posts on his own site relating to his teaching are great, including this set of questions he’s looking at in his use of Weblogs:
Can technology solve some problem in a better or more meaningful way than another, non-techie way?
In this case, I’m concerned with the following issues:
1) We spend most of our time in the classroom off in the ether of rhetorical analysis or argument structure or whatever, and there are no real outlets for them to discuss the connections between what we’re reading and what they see going on in the “real world.”
2) I want students to evaluate sources from day one–and not wait until the major research essay at the end of the semester.
3) I want to give students a little more room to roam around in their responses to the texts.
4) I want students to see themselves as taking part in a larger set of discussions, and really, in the end, to see the way that technology like Blogger goes a long way toward democratizing the publishing of what Scott Russell Sanders calls “the individual mind at work and play.”
I think it’s so cool to see more and more educators pushing their thinking and sharing the struggle. It always makes me push my own thinking on what I’m doing.
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