Finding Common Ground

Another presentation by Will Richardson and it was nice that he started with questions from the audience, rather than going with a formal presentation track.
Some questions - My take on the response in italics.

*How do we get started? There are free tools that can be used - Blogger, Edublogs, Class Blogmeister, Vox
*How do we get teachers interested? Share what you are learning and how you are learning it. Make it relevant for their position. Show them the future and take the ones that want to go along. Others may be left behind.
*How can we be sure the kids are safe? Some tools allow for keeping the blog private and can also allow post and comment approval. Personally, we’ve kept our initial student blogs private - but as we move forward I can see making the blogs public to allow the students access to a greater audience.
*Should student posts and comments be forced into an approval process? You can moderate (approve/disapprove) or you can monitor posts and comments. Personally, I have been trying it both ways and the moderating way is time intensive for the teachers. Using monitoring is less time intensive and also the way to teach ethical use of the tools.
*How do you handle parents? Educate the parents about what blogging is and what it isn’t. Share the goals and objectives that will be worked on and met with the blog. Add blogging to your AUP and enforce violations. There’s a sample blogging contract at adavis.pbwiki.com.

Blogging can be seen as an online diary or journal, but really it is an avenue to have our students really think about what they’ve read before responding. This requires active reading of material and then real evaluation and synthesis of that information before any writing even takes place. Will organizes and runs his sessions from a wiki page - by doing this, he is demonstrating a way that teachers could use the same type of set up in the classroom - or, better yet, a way students can organize information themselves on a given topic.

Scenario: An elementary school teacher wants to have the kids dialog about current events. The daily paper comes to school every day and the students look at the articles and discuss what is going in their hometown (in their classroom of 30 students).  Now, another approach would be to set up an aggregator that pulled in worldwide headlines from various sources that would be appropriate for the grade level. Teach the students to read 1-2 headlines from the aggregated sources and begin a blog where the students can share their take on the headlines and comment on the posts of each other. If current events is not appropriate for your grade level, poll your class to find their interests and gather the feeds for sites that contain that information and let them blog about that. They’ll be learning, sharing and growing on topics they are interested in.

Filed under: Learning From and