I currently
teach 4th grade. I teach only Reading and Science to all 44 of my
students. I currently use images as a
part of my reading class. When the students come into my room they will look at
the image of the day and depending on the skill we are working on, they have to
give me some information. They might have to make an inference based on the
image, tell what the Author’s purpose was, make a prediction about the image,
or many other things. We then share our thoughts about the image of the
day. I think it would be beneficial to
put the image on the blog and the students can comment instead of share with
the class. I feel like this would be beneficial to the lesson because the
students could do it before or after class and this might actually park some
interest between student’s comments. They will start having conversations with
each other and expanding on what others have posted.
In Science, I think I could use the
blog for multiple things. I could post assignments, pictures of what the
students have done, and even student created videos. The one thing that I think
I would like most about using the blog during my science class is for
communication. I like to show different vodcasts throughout the year that are
experiments related to our topic at that time. I could post the vodcast to our
blog and then have the students respond to it on the blog. They could post
questions that they still have and other students could answer their questions.
To me, this is a great way for students to collaborate and work together when
they cannot always physically be together.
The true potential of blogs in
schools comes when students and teachers use them as publishing tools
(Richardson, 2009, p.43). This is
ultimately my goal, to have students publishing work and research on the blog.
This is not something that I will start with, but this is something that my
students will start doing once they are comfortable with the blog, how it
works, and my expectations upon them publishing their work.
Resources
Richardson,
W. (2009). Blogs, wiks, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms
(2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.
