WOW! That is my immediate reaction to reading about Web 2.0! My head is spinning and I feel even further out of touch than I did before I began this journey. I feel as if I have been cheating my students out of an education that meets their learning needs and abilities. How bored they must be in my classroom!
Reading up on these articles in Discovery Resources makes me anxious to learn more so that I can do more for my students and in my classroom to make it an exciting learning environment.
As I said before, simply creating a blog to post classroom assignments and discussions would be a good start to incorporating Web 2.0.
After reading the articles in "Thing 2", I have a new goal of getting a blog set up for classroom use for the 2010/2011 school year. I am excited, yet overwhelmed at the idea all at once.
A huge obstacle in the way of this idea is the availability of computer access on our campus. We do have 3 computers being set up in core classrooms over the summer, but it becomes difficult to even rotate throughout a class period with classes of at least 20 students in each period while trying to get all tasks accomplished. My hopes are to set up a 10 minute blogging block every Friday to reflect on the weeks instruction with the focus on figuring out how to have enough computer access for all students to accomplish this in a timely manner.
Another obstacle is finding the time to keep up with a blog in the classroom. As teachers, we struggle to keep our heads above water on a daily basis and one more task on the agenda is usually not voluntary! Blogging in particular is not something that you can put off or skip if you have students and parents following, it has to be done on a regular basis no matter how full your plate becomes. I believe this pressure might be a definite deterrent for some.
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You're right on about the problems you foresee in maintaining a blog. It provides a lot of opportunity, but it can be a lot of work, too! And making sure that kids have time to actually view the blog, post to it, or work online in any other way can be stressful. The benefit of struggling through all of that, though, is engaging the kids in a really exciting way.
ReplyDeleteYou may want to check out this explanation of a "Scribe Post": http://adifference.blogspot.com/2005/11/scribe-post.html. Basically, scribing is a way of putting the blogging responsibility in the students' hands. This might relieve some of the pressure you'd feel if you, the teacher, were doing all of the blogging. Plus, it gives the students ownership of the blog and allows them to reflect on concepts you explore in the classroom in an online setting. You can rotate scribes, so that you may only need to provide two or three kids with computer time during class each week. There are lots of options; check out this list of classes that use the Scribe post concept: http://thescribepost.pbworks.com/ScribingClasses.
Great job; you're moving right along! Thing 2 complete!