EduBlog Insights

On my drive home from work the other day, another idea raced through my mind. Another weblog possibility to explore that could increase the voices being heard on weblogs - expand the community. Voices from outside the school….

Right before I left J.H. House to come to Georgia State University, I had developed a Biz Pal EMail program between our students and our School/Business Partners.

Here is the educational purpose I wrote for the original project:

“To engage our students with our business partners in ‘a purposeful effort to build a collaborative project that will build new ways of learning and communicating for our students’.  Our educational purpose is to expand our current keypal project into one which represents a new generation designed for online activity.  Our goal is to shape an exemplary curriculum approaches for School/Business Partners in an ever-changing information age.”

Now that sounds made to order for weblogs. Basically one student in each class in grades 3-5 represented their classroom by writing to a General Mills employee. The “Biz Pal” and the student corresponded about items that related to the news, talked about their jobs in business and how learning was relevant in their world. The two shared environments with a focus on stimulating thinking and learning from the writing process.

Now I’m thinking I can just set this up in weblogs. There will still be one student, one business partner but this gives a better way to open up the communication to the rest of the class, parents, and others. I pitched the idea to the principal. She liked it. Next up is to meet with the General Mills CEO.

I’m thinking that I could have two authors to a weblog to begin with with possibility of adding more. They could post pack and forth and students and educators could comment. I’m liking this more and more.

I would welcome any comments, suggestions, ideas as I keeping “thinking-about” this school-wide weblog project.  I’m going to get the principal’s weblog up and going, have some meetings with students, faculty, business partners, and others as we shape this so I’ve got a little window of time to keep on reflecting. Chime in!

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 22nd, 2004 at 1:57 pm and is filed under About Weblogs, Imported. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.