Searching “Back & Forth”
I keep searching for more weblogs that are actually used as a writing/content area by teachers with students. I keep thinking about “student voices”. We need to get them to more a part of this process. This summer I am going to try a project with 3 or 4 of my students from the NewsQuest group. It is going to be a sort of unstructured or semi-structured journey that will foster writing, reflecting, and thinking. I have already asked the students if they would be interested in doing this over the summer. They were! My initial thinking is to let each student create a personal weblog that will be on a topic/topics of their choice. I’m also thinking of a group EduBlog that I will sort of lead - probably throwing out simple prompts or maybe even a few thought provoking questions to see where it leads. I am going to create an additional weblog that will be called Back & Forth that will be just for communication between myself and the kids for questions they want answered, ideas they have, my thought, their thoughts, etc. These thoughts can be totally unrelated to the other EduBlogs. Next week I will meet with the parents and students. All of the above could change based on their input.
Now here is the kicker, I am going to see if I can do this without physically meeting with the students. This may work, but again it may all be changed as we go along. Summer is short and there may not be time to do all I am thinking about but it’s a start. If I can learn from this and make it work- I can think of a lot of possibilities. Any suggestions, thoughts out there?
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