Wednesday 1 February 2012

Blogging FOR the Classroom

For my Tech class, we had to create an "EDUBlog" where we role-play as a teacher.  Mine is Miss Eakins's Class News - feel free to check it out!  Creating a blog for a "pretend" classroom  has been an interesting experience.  Originally I thought it would be extremely difficult to imagine that students would be reading this on a daily basis and using it to enhance their learning.  However, I then thought about it being like creating lesson plans for imaginary students in the Teacher Education program and how these are not meant to be perfect, but a way to experience what it would be like in the real world and learn from it.  That's what I did with this blog.
Photo credit:  alamodestuff
Keeping a blog for students is very useful because children of extremely young ages are using technology to learn and experience their world.  If I can bring "their world" into my classroom, then their learning can only improve and become more engaging because it is more meaningful. 

Differentiated Instruction is something I've heard a lot about this year, and maintaining a classroom blog can reach students of various learning styles.  Adding a variety of videos and audio clips is one way to engage your visual and auditory learners, and to add in interactive websites where students can drag-and-drop objects or type in text boxes is a way to engage kinaesthetic learners.  Even better, these things will benefit all students - which provides further evidence that a Universal Design for Learning is effective and very attainable.

A classroom blog can be a convenient way to combine various curricular subjects.  Websites such as BitStrips and SlideRocket can combine Language, Visual Arts, and Technology all into one performance-based task.  Webquests or Scavenger Hunts can allow students to explore an endless variety of educational websites while recording their findings on a website like Popplet, which could aid them in creating a piece of writing that is research-based.

Finally, updating a classroom blog can keep students and their families up-to-date on current classroom and school events, which eliminates having to e-mail parents or send out paper newsletters - it's eco-friendly! 
I can't wait to be able to create a blog for a real life classroom one day!

3 comments:

  1. Hey there!! I missed #ntchat tonight but saw that you blogged about it! I was checking out this blog and saw your mock-up for a classroom blog. Love it! I love how you have different sections - parts for parents and parts for kids. I have a blog with my 3rd graders and I love the idea of having different pages for each. Sometimes I have things I want to share with students that parents don't necessarily NEED to check out....

    Feel free to check out my blog... http://missberg22.blogspot.com/

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Danielle! Thanks for the comment! How do your students feel about having a classroom blog? I'm curious to see how real-life students react to and use them :)

    Also, I bookmarked a few websites while on #ntchat the other night. Here they are if you'd like to check them out!
    http://cybraryman.com/ - Catalogue of great resources!
    http://therookieteacher.ca/ - not sure if this will be applicable for you, but it's a website created by someone who graduated from the same school as me but a year ago, and it has a lot of great information!
    http://www.mixbook.com/ - website where you can create online scrapbooks.
    http://jeopardylabs.com/ - create a Jeopardy game based on the content you're teaching! Very cool

    Have a great weekend!
    - Kristen.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Danielle - I used the Labels gadget to categorize my "posts" for parents and students. You can add the label to each blog post, and then parents and students can navigate to the posts directed to them. Just thought I'd pass that along in case you're interested in doing the same for your blog!

    ReplyDelete