This assignment really helped me to reform a lesson idea that I had already started on, but hadn't yet had the opportunity to research and plan it out in its entirety. Blogging in the classroom is something that I have been very excited about the past few weeks, and have been taking the steps to introduce it to my students.
Last week, I introduced my class to blogging, but I had a difficult time explaining it in terms they understand. When we received our tablets a few weeks ago, the kids seemed to be under the impression that they could use them to chat back and forth. Their hope that this would be something they would be allowed to do, combined with my difficulty finding the right explanation, caused them to just interpret blogging as a way of talking back and forth. I managed to redirect most of them from this mentality, but there are still a few students who just can't wrap their heads around what a blog is. After researching blog integration for this assignment, I plan on backing things up a few steps and trying the "paper blogs" that Lacina and Griffith mentioned in their article, Blogging as a Means of Crafting Writing. I think this concrete way of showing the kids what blogging is all about will solidify the purpose of a blog for all of them. I also am now more comfortable with the idea of letting the kids choose some of their own topics to blog about so that their writing has more meaning to them. I wasn't sure about how comfortable I was with this notion at first, but the articles I read convinced me otherwise.
In regard to the citations themselves, there were two articles that I could not locate DOIs for. I used crossref.org, and tried looking up the journals themselves and could not locate any information beyond just URLs. I did include the DOIs that I could track down, and the URLs for the other articles. If anyone has advice for how I may track them down, I would really love to know about it! My hope (and what I had to finally resign myself to) is that they just may not have DOIs assigned to them.
Thank you for reading my post, you can access my research by clicking here.
Hello Kimberly. Your EDTECH research was great. I have not heard of the site KidBlog, but I would really like to hear how it works for your students. I agree with you that by allowing students to create blogs on topics they choose may be a more effective tool of blogging. I am hoping that my students involvement in blogging will increase their participation in writing as well. I look forward to hearing how weblogs work for your students as I embark on this with my students as well.
ReplyDeleteKim,
ReplyDeleteI obviously liked your topic (as mine is similar) but I especially liked what I read in the last two articles about 1) the fact that using a blog vastly improved the students' scores and 2) how this is something that can be easily shared with parents. Perhaps parents could be encouraged to comment on their own child's writing as further motivation to do their very best work.
I had the very same thought about parents commenting on their child's writing. Our parent teacher conferences are coming up in two weeks, and I plan on sharing the KidBlog site with them at that time. I created a parent-guest account when I set up my class so that parents have the option to comment. I really hope they take advantage of the option!
DeleteHi Kim, I enjoyed reading your research paper. I think that blogging is a great way to encourage students to take pride in their work and, is something that they will really enjoy doing. I like the idea of having a free day of sorts where students are allowed to pick any topic that interests them and, having blogs available for peer comments. Nice work!
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