EduBlog Insights

I thought I’d give a couple of blogging snapshots of my sessions with the second graders and the high school guys.

I have to say that these second graders are really taking to the blogging. We have gotten a lot done in a short time. This week they blogged their thoughts about writing and drew some cute illustrations. They did this for homework and brought it to the lab to type. They ran out of time to answer all their comments. See their posts on Neville’s Bloggers.I only have this group a little under an hour and they haven’t yet mastered the typing skills but it is pretty impressive what they are getting done. I am orchestrating this project a little different. They don’t have individual blogs. It is all done on the class blog. I think a classroom teacher would be able to manage it. At first it takes a lot of time, just as anything else would as you are setting up the process. The students have had to learn a number of routines quickly. They save to the network drive on a folder entitled blogging inside Miss Neville’s folder. Right now they are typing their post on word, then we copy and paste onto the blog under Miss Neville’s sign in. Right now we are helping a lot with these mechanics but I don’t think it will be too long before the students will take over. They use these titles on their files; for instance, “Brittany’s Post on Writing”. Then when they save it on the hard drive. They are learning to click before their name and use a one word descriptor for the particular post. An example for this session is “writingBrittany”. This routine will help keep us sane, organized and will expedite the process. We even had parents enter the conversations on the commenting part. That was great. We even had younger brothers enter the conversations, too. I know this group is going to take some interesting turns and we will learn a lot. Miss Neville is enthusiastic and sees the potential.

My high school guys blogged about slavery this week. They had listened to the book, To Be a Slave, by Julius Lester. It really moved them. The writing is, well the word that comes to mind is excruciating, but they are coming along. They hang in there. Next session we are aiming to have them listen to actual slave narratives and then blog about it. Check it out at Getting Heard.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 17th, 2006 at 2:26 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.