Monday, October 18, 2010
Student Accountability
As I considered how to blogs with my students, a ton of ideas went running through my head. At the end of each lesson idea, I kept coming back to, "students will need to respond to all other students." (I have small groups, so this would be managable and appropritate for them) This made me realize that when students are blogging, in addition to being motivated, they are held accountable because others will see and need to respond to their posts. It's not like an assignment that gets lost in the "not done yet" side of their school folders. Students will want to read classmates' work and see the responses to their own. I think this is a great opportunity for students to experience and learn about accountability. I can only imagine the types of teachable moments that could arise. I also like that blogs make it easier for teachers to see who has posted, how many times, how often, and quickly get an overview of the quality of posts. Here is a teacher's blog entry about how she uses blogs with her middle school aged after school ESL progam. She provides links to the students' blogs - and they are very powerful. It appears that the students really opened up about their experiences and hopes for the future.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Hi Jaime,
ReplyDeleteI really like this post. I agree that blogging provides great opportunities for student interactions and writing. I think students would be more willing to post their experiences and hopes in a blog than to discuss them initially, but I also think that by responding to blogs students will open up more about their feelings. Great post.
Valerie
Interesting thoughts. I am liking the idea of students blogging too. We used to have to write journals at school but no-one ever collected them or read them. This way the self expression is let loose and shared.
ReplyDeleteYeah, we did the journals, too, and it seemed like nothing every came of them. Having a real audience to read the work will be very motivating.
ReplyDeleteI was thinking that with the large emphasis we place on BCR's for students to complete in regards to state testing, that blogs coul dactually be a teaching tool to improve BCR answers. Many students hate BCR's and love working on the computer. Teachers could use blogs, as a class or individually, for students to post thier BCR's or express thier ideas in a blog format rather than a paper pencil format. Fellow students would also have access to these bolgs and be able to evaluate the effectiveness of the BCR or written ideas.
ReplyDelete