Welcome to Teachers At Risk
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Feb
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For most of the last two weeks my head’s been spinning. There’s just too much going on. Final evaluations are marked, report cards completed, one meeting attended , two meetings attended, three meetings attended, my desk in office all cleared off, well almost, new classroom blog created using www. edublogs. org, learning how to get more out of my widgets, learning about hyperlinks and html, learning how to customize my blog roll learning, learning, learning. I need a break from learning.
Most of this learning has been learning things in order to set up my classroom blog. I’m really serious about having a class blog for my Advanced Learning Strategies Class , and I’m trying to remember my own advice: think big, start small. Except, I want to think big, start big and do it all now, hence the spinning head.
I’ve decided to take it one small step at a time. I’m going start by posting journal assignments in The Advanced Learning Strategies Blog, my classroom blog and then have students write their reflections as a comment. I’m having a lot of fun finding pictures for my blog. I’ve only got a couple of posts up because it’s the new semester. Ironically, today was supposed to be the first day of the new semester but school was canceled because of a wonderfully impressive storm. The groundhog is in for a real surprise tomorrow, Groundhog Day, when he comes out to see if he can see his shadow and tell us how much longer winter will last.
As far as the blog goes, I’m trying to grab the kids attention so later next week I’m posting a photo of a tattoo that’s really cool and fits in with the classroom agreements about mutual respect. I also have a photo of face piercings that I just know will generate some buzz. I want to catch their attention. I don’t want the blog to be just another form of a notebook. I’ll see how that goes. I’ll start by moderating any comments, too. I know that students would like to see what they have written instantly, but I’m not ready for that yet. Yes, I think that sums it up as far as classroom blogging. I’m not ready for the big time, yet.
Maybe I need to have something like a graduated license for student bloggers much like the graduated license we have for new drivers here in Ontario. Now, I know there are huge advantageous to throwing student blogging wide open. I’d like to do that, but I know that some of my students – how shall I say this – need to have boundaries in place for them so I’m reluctant to give them free range even after discussing appropriate behaviour while on the blog. I think the appropriate behaviour on the blog would be much the same as the appropriate behaviour in my classroom- mutual respect, attentive listening, no put downs, and showing appreciation when appropriate. I think that covers everything.
If someone reading this has had experience with a wide open class blog with kids who can be very creative in the ways they amuse themselves at the expense of others at times, I would really appreciate some feedback. If not, I’ll just take one baby step at a time until I feel comfortable having a more open blog.
At this point, I want to say that the edublogs.org site has been very user friendly and the new Edublogger by Sue explains things so that even I can get it. Believe me, sometimes I have a hard time getting even the obvious. My brain just doesn’t think in a digital fashion ,and I won’t be able to get something to work because I miss the obvious. My kids tell me that I’m making it too hard. I used to think that I had this problem because I was a digital immigrant, but I’ve come to the conclusion it’s not that. It’s just my brain. I just don’t get the obvious. Lucky I’m persistent and people around me are patient.
Update-reflections about my two years of blogging- click here to read my reflections,
Related Posts
Related posts:
- A Helpful Resource For Starting A Blog In The Classroom
- Blogging in the Classroom- By Invitation Only
- The 5 W’s and the 1 H of a Classroom Blog.
- Blogging in the Classroom: Step One
- Most popular blog about classroom management
Comments
8 Responses to “Reflections about starting my classroom blog”
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Edublog Awards
Toronto Reading Council
Elona, what an amazing idea. I just visited the site and it looks beautiful. I’ll be really interested to hear how this goes, and I’ll be thinking about ways I could suggest this at my school. Thank you for sharing!
Hi Eleona,
Mabuhay! I’m a Biology teacher from the Philippines and used my blog for my class too. I post some of my lessons,school events, grades,assignments etc. I have a chat-box before where visitors can comment. The irony of it since it is open to public, I experienced nasty words from unknown students shouting their dislikes from a certain teacher and their classmates and later saying nasty things about me. I had to remove right away that chat-box. Of course they will not admit it because anybody can used pseudonyms or even the name of their classmate to blaim. But nevertheless,classroom blog can help in the delivery of the lesson. By the way, I like your entry regarding classroom management. More power.
Sukhdeep,
Thanks for the encouragement. I too am interested how my classroom blog http://www.mrshartjes1.edublogs.org goes.
Arlan,
Thanks for sharing your experience with classroom blogs. I’m hoping to eliminate some problems by reading the comments before someone posts them. Thankfully, that is an option in edublogs.
Elona, I’ve been checking in with your class blog every week and I am so impressed with the photos, the thought-provoking quotes and questions, and your students’ responses. This is inspiring. I just wanted to share that with you.
Thanks for letting us into your classroom.
Sukhdeep,
Thank you for those kind words. I’m impressed with how thoughtful the kids are. Who knew when all you often see is attitude!
Hi Elona,
I stumbled across your blog from Leading From the Heart, and felt obliged to comment here. While I haven’t taught in public schools I have led students as part of my recently completed MA degree, where I used blogs to communicate with students and facilitate interclassroom discussions.
I think that talking to students *before* the blog goes live is important. In that talk, you do more than just lay down your rules (though you almost certainly will have to, simply because of school policies) – you also ask for their input, and as a class develop the guidelines. As soon as they recognize themselves as both the authors and addressees of the rules surrounding the blog they will both be more likely to adhere to those rules and, having legitimized the rules (hopefully consented to possible punishments that follow from breaking rules) I would expect they would be more ‘willing’ to accept the consequences for violating rules.
I found that disconnecting the blog from the classroom is where a variety of problems crop up. I let students post without my moderating comments, and if I detected a problem in how things were working I noted that there would be a discussion of appropriate use in the next class. In the following class, I would always devote a few minutes to talk about what had been going on on the blog and the cool things that were going on (which happened most of the time), or why what was going on wasn’t appropriate for an educational environment (which happened only rarely).
I recognize that I deal with ‘mature’ students but hope that this was helpful nevertheless.
Thank you for taking the time to share your insights. I agree that any rules in the classroom and by extension in the blog it self need to have student input. At the beginning of the semester we come up with our community agreements for the class collaboratively. I tell the kids that they are experts at knowing what makes a classroom work since by high school they’ve been in so many and have see what needs to happen to make a classroom work. I do an group activity that asks them to come up with suggestions. We then categorize them so that they fall under the following – mutual respect, attentive listening, no put-downs d and I add the right not to participate in discussions if they don’t feel up to it. We talk about what these look like, sound like, feel like etc so we are all clear on what each one means. These become our community agreements and students make signs and we post them in the classroom. Then I hear kids saying “No put-downs, attentive listening , mutual respect. The remind each other about the mutual agreements and they remind me sometimes that they do not want to participate in a discussion. Everyone must complete assignments, homework, tests etc. They can only opt out of student discussions. I haven’t had a kid abuse it yet. Peer pressure to live up to our community agreements is the key. I don’t really have to say too much. I focus on the positive- catch them doing good.
As far as the blog,I agree with you but we had an incident at the school with inappropriate student email. It wasn’t any of my kids.
I want to moderate the comments so that I can keep kids outside the class from being disrespectful.My students want this too. We discussed it. They feel safe because I can protect them from negative comments. I will be inviting my kids to be contributers and even authors, but not yet.
Hello!
Very Interesting post! Thank you for such interesting resource!
PS: Sorry for my bad english, I’v just started to learn this language
See you!
Your, Raiul Baztepo