Sunday, January 9, 2011

Activity 1 - Beginner - Extention

I joined the Teacher Challenge’s 30 Days to Kick Starting your Blogging to do just that... to kick start my blogging again. I took a professional learning class called 23 Things that introduced me to all of the Web 2.0 tools available. I had previously thought of myself as pretty technologically advanced since both my bachelor's and master's degrees were online, but I found out how much had changed in the few years I had not been a student.

I want to see what other teachers are doing with blogging and see if they have any suggestions. I met with a lot of resistance from parents and my administrators when I wanted to blog with my students. I was completely shocked! On top of that, I found very little in the way of resources available to help with the resistance. I also had problems finding a blogging platform for which I could easily sign students up and control their access to the outside world (a parent concern/resistance) and the access of the outside world to them. I didn't know where to go from there and kind of gave up.

5 comments:

  1. Hi Jessica,
    I was so lucky. My principal loves us trying new things and I was the first teacher blogging at our school.

    The first year I did it just with my home class, sent a letter home to parents about it saying it was part of their English lessons.

    I didn't have any parents argue or try to restrict what I was doing - in fact a few left comments on the blog as well.

    Now I blog with all grade 6/7 students as part of their ICT classes at http://sormid67.edublogs.org

    PS Not everyone has a Google account, so often good to have name/URL as an option for the profile when leaving a comment.

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  2. Blogging with students will maybe my next goal. I know I will have the my fair share of resistance.Along with the lecture of student safety.

    I also am hoping from this challenge is seeing how effective others are already using web 2.0 world to elevate learning. They already are doing more online outside of school. Why not use their experiences in learning.

    Good Luck to you.

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  3. HI Jessica
    I too want to blog with my students. I teach high school creative writing and blogging seems to be a great way for them to write for the world. I hope I can get this going through the blogging challenge.Hopefully, I won't meet with the resistance that you did. I'll be interested in reading how you handle the resistance!

    Happy Blogging!
    Deb

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  4. Hi, Jessica. I am VERY new to blogging, and I'm just not ready to start blogging with my high school students yet. I plan on getting there someday, and when I get to that point, I want to make it clear to parents that kids of this generation are going to have to become proficient at online communication. Period. What better (or safer) place to get that started than in a classroom environment? Keeping kids offline is simply not going to be an option, so it's our job as teachers to teach them how to be safe, responsible, contributing members of that society. I think it is sad that even your administrators are not backing you up. Wake up, everyone. It's 2011. Good luck in your future endeavors!

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  5. I GET this topic to long time. I’ll add Favorites your site to read again .

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