Trial Post: Week 2 Assignments

Assignment 1: Reflection

After reading a few of the articles about blogs I feel that I have a better understanding of how they could be used in a classroom. Even after reading these articles I still believe that the use of blogs would be most beneficial with older students. I teach first grade and students at this age level are at the emergent stage of reading and writing. They are learning how to type in computer class but I do not think their skills are at a level where they could easily type a post to a class blog. If I were to try and have the students make a post to a class blog I suppose I would have them write about a given topic and then retype what they have written onto the blog. For example, my class is starting a science unit on weather. During this unit the students write about their favorite kind of weather. After the students wrote their ideas down on paper they could transfer their thoughts onto the class blog by retyping what is on the written page. This would be rather time consuming but it could be a way to get my first graders blogging.

In the article, Blogging! It’s Elementary My Dear Watson I thought it was interesting that the article mentioned that students would write with greater attention to grammar, punctuation and spelling when they know they are writing for an audience and not just for their teacher. I do agree with that however, I think many students are used to texting and emailing and often use “slang” or abbreviations to quickly express their thoughts. I believe it would be important for a teacher to explain the importance of being mindful of their use of grammar, punctuation and spelling while posting their work and reflections on a class blog. Also, in this article I liked the idea of having a password to protect what is being published on the blog. This would help eliminate posting something that should not be on the blog.

The other article I read was entitled, Panelists: Blogs are Changing Education. This article made me realize that more classrooms are using blogs than I originally thought. It will be interesting to see how mainstream this becomes. It seems Billerica is just beginning to really implement technology into the everyday lives of teachers and students. It will be interesting to see where this takes us as a school system and how this will affect education in general.

Assignment 3: Link to my comment on a blog.
http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/?p=1677#comments