I’m doing a little informal classroom research that will attempt to apply the Anne method for building community through the class portal. For the next few days, I’m going to be focusing on pulling best practices from the kids’ sites into the class homepage, as I did today. I’m also going to start urging them to read and write more about each other’s experiences. Many of them have been doing a great job of recording their process and making notes, but it still seems pretty individualized. I want them to start feeling like more of a team. (Note: This may just be an aftereffect from seeing “Miracle” on Monday.) Anyway, I’m going to see if I can’t get them interacting online a bit more. (Another note: As I’ve said before, this would be a lot easier, I think, if they didn’t see each other every day. Still, I think there are some students in my class who would rather write about their frustrations than talk about them.)
On another note, the research via RSS experiment is working pretty well. Claire, who is doing a story on what effects the legalization of gay marriage might have on school sex ed curricula, is getting some great stories fed right to her from Google News. Others are reporting the same. It appears to make a difference when the reserach comes to you as opposed to having to find it. I’m thinking this will be a standard feature of my journalism student Weblogs from this point on. Now if I could just get some teachers interested in this feature…
—–