Classroom
Ok, somebody pinch me…another <a href=”http://www.sptimes.com/2005/08/09/Tampabay/Blogging_classroom_co.shtml”>positive newspaper article </a>about blogs in the classroom? I’d say we’re on a roll!
<blockquote>Blogs have long been popular among teenagers and young adults, who often use them at home as virtual diaries and write about their personal lives. But a growing number of teachers like Fred Roemer, Kayla’s teacher, are discovering that students are just as eager to blog about math and history.</blockquote>
And I absolutely love this:
<blockquote>On the class Web site, Schubert could see her daughter’s spelling grades half an hour after she had taken a test or monitor deadlines for assignments. But the highlight, Schubert said, was the daily classroom blog written by the fifth-graders.
She checked it at least once a day, she said.
“I liked knowing what was going on in class, seeing what they were doing, what they were learning, just knowing my daughter was in a safe place,” Schubert said.</blockquote>
Maybe we’re turning the corner here, and maybe this is a golden opportunity for those teachers using blogs successfully in the classroom to dial up their local newspapers and let them know what they’re up to. The angle is simple: Weblogs can be much more than just online journals. They can be effective learning and communication tools as well. AND, by using them in our curricula, we model appropriate use.
In fact, this has been a pretty good day, blogwise all the way around. Check out this excerpt from the <a href=”http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=27338″>Moodle blogs forum</a> from James Robertson:
<blockquote>I appreciate all the discussion about blogs vs forums — many fine points. But for me the clincher in the argument for blogs is my 18-year-old daughter who loves to blog. She is especially pleased with some of them, and reads them out loud to me. She explains why she wrote it and why she expressed herself the way she did, and what other approaches she might have taken but didn’t. She also reads blogs from her friends that she really enjoyed and talks about what makes them enjoyable.</blockquote>
We haven’t talked too much around here about the parent-child-blog relationship because there hasn’t really been that much to say. But maybe these are the seeds…
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