Using Blogs within the classroom is a great way to eliminate the boundaries of your classroom walls. Students and classes can connect with others around the world to provide global insight, as well as to provide an authentic audience that is outside of the classroom. While classroom blogging has many benefits, Waters suggests in her blog that students must learn how to be successful, safe bloggers. As teachers, we must hold students accountable for their blogging, just as we would in any other piece of writing, but also for creating a positive digital footprint. After researching and reviewing multiple Blog Rubrics, I have decided that when evaluating student blogs, I would like to narrow it down to three criteria: content/personal connection, respectfulness, and sentence/mechanical structure. I added “personal connection” to the content portion of the rubric because blogs often relate content to their lives. As teachers, we typically do not read a blog about Google Classroom for a summary. Instead, we are reading the blog about Google Classroom for ideas on how to implement it into our lives. Similarly, students should be using the same technique in their blogs- do not regurgitate information, connect it to our lives. This “personal connection” component was inspired by a rubric created by Brenda Dyck. Another inspiration for my blog evaluation criteria is from Scholastic News Online’s Blog Rubric, who inspired me to use “respectfulness.” This is not a criteria that I found often while researching student blog rubrics, but feel as though it is a very important skill to develop within our students as they are communicating more and more often with others outside our classroom. Blogging in the classroom is great way to achieve a variety of objectives: providing an authentic audience for student work, connecting students to other students, connecting students to experts in various fields, or even a way to creatively express their writing. Students, however, must be taught how to achieve these objectives, just like they must be taught our academic objectives. We must go slowly, model, and provide timely feedback. The rubric posted below will help to evaluate in order to provide clear, valuable feedback. Waters, S. (2013, February 11). Getting more out of student blogs [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://suewaters.com/2013/02/11/getting-more-out-of-student-blogging/ Rubric created by Brenda Dyck Scholastic News Online’s Blog Rubric Thanks to Pixabay for the image used in this post!
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In my four-year-teaching-expert opinion, there is one thing that most educators can agree upon: students must learn more than the set of skills listed in the Georgia Performance Standards; they must establish a more suitable set of skills that will grant them ability to “interact with information, analyze what they find, create knowledge, and then communicate the results to a real audience” (Solomon and Schrum, 2014). While there is not a one-size-fits-all approach to educating students with this set of skills, there are ample Web 2.0 tools to which teachers can turn. As Solomon and Schrum suggest, “Web-based tools offer new potential for learning.” This rings true for my personal classroom. Discovering Google Classroom has changed my outlook on lesson design and students’ display of content mastery. While I knew I wanted to move towards personalized learning and a student-centered classroom, I did not quite know how to get there until Google Classroom. Google Classroom, certainly, is not the end-all, be-all answer, but it opened my eyes to the endless possibilities of Web 2.0 tools. With Google Classroom, I am able to provide personalized feedback on assignments before they are submitted. In my paper-pencil days, it would have been nearly impossible to leave personalized, individual feedback for each of my ninety-nine students in less than two hours. This piece alone was a game-changer for my classroom. These web-based tools can also assist teachers in providing support for students with a diverse set of learning needs. For example in Google Classroom, I am able to differentiate assignments discretely; since students are on a device, it is not obvious that one student may have more supporting materials than another student. Even though I am obsessing over Google Classroom, there is a plethora of other tools to support the diverse needs of our students. Lately, I have been using the SpeakIt extension on Google which reads text aloud for students. This, too, is discrete within the classroom. Although I use multiple Web 2.0 tools in my classroom, I am thrilled to keep exploring! I am especially excited to learn more about integrating audio and podcasting tools, along with integrating presentation and video-editing tools. My initial thoughts of these Web 2.0 tools is that I feel comfortable using these types of tools for my instruction, but I am ready to get out of my comfort zone and set my students loose on these tools to show content mastery. As Solomon and Schrum convey, “using tools and learning with them are two different things.” I look forward to learning how to create a more authentic learning experience that is student-directed with these tools in a more coherent strategy. Solomon, G., & Schrum, L. (2014). Web 2.0 How-To for Educators. (2nd ed.). Eugene: ISTE. Thanks to wikimediacommons.org for the image used in this blog! |
AuthorSarah Miller Archives
July 2017
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