Blogs

Several weeks ago, seems a lot longer, I started a classroom blog. After a false attempt on edublog I decided to use our school server. I wasn’t convinced it was the best and actually wasn’t happy that there would be no widgets. Now to be honest, 2 months ago I didn’t know there was such a thing as a widget or what it would be used for! Last week I realized that I really needed to move my classroom blog to a Pro edublog. Thankfully our tech facilitator had already setup pro blogs for 5 of the classroom teachers – Thank you Grace. Now I’m working on how to link photo albums. I started with Flickr and discovered I needed a “pro” account there too. Once you get started there is no end to what you want to do and how it can be done. I know I still have a lot to learn.

I know I should be posting on the classroom blog, but I’m also trying to figure out how to have students reflect on their work for their portfolios. Last week I asked them to reflect on what we had done in class and was disappointed with the results. Recently I read a post on student reflection. I realized I need to give them guiding questions to help their writing. We’ll be trying again this week with some questions and possibly even some photos of students at work.

Just as I want the students to reflect on their learning I need to continually reflect and check my own learning.

  1. What have I learned this week?
  2. How can I use what I’ve learned?
  3. How might I adapt what I learned?
  4. Can I share what I learned with a colleague? (Last week I was having a conversation with a colleague who is taking an online class. We were talking about reading online and note taking. I was able to share diigo with her and hopefully she found it useful. I know sometimes I can be excited about something, but the other person isn’t ready to hear it or doesn’t want to hear it.)
  5. Where do I go from here? – I am looking forward to the next Coetail course and what other new challenges are in store.

2 thoughts on “Blogs

  1. I enjoyed this post, Jean. I think you are making great progress. I like how you explain that the student responses need a guide. I am finding that students often need a pretty clear structure for assignments. They need to know what is expected of them, but we don’t want to make it so structured that they are merely filling in the blanks. There’s a creative balance to be struck. I enjoyed reading the other blog that you linked to as well. It showed a good way to pull student response toward the higher end of Bloom’s Taxonomy. Nice job. Enjoy your Monday off. 🙂

    • Thanks Ruth, hope you enjoyed your day off on Friday. I was hoping students would comment on the blog posting I did last week on our class blog, but so far only 3 students have posted a comment. 1 student has posted 3 times! but that still leaves 20 who haven’t posted and I asked some questions in the posting. Guess I need to send a reminder email, but then again with a long weekend maybe a lot didn’t have access to a computer. I’ll see what happens on Monday and ask the students on Tuesday.

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