EduBlog Insights

Friday was my second session with the second graders. They are really blowing my mind. I provided links on the class blog back to the comments they had gotten in response to the comments they had written the week before. It takes them a while to type in these URL’s. They are commenting away! After a quick review they got right down to it, many finishing several comments. I found out that one of the students has her own blog. Her 12 year old sister made the blog for her. When she was making her comment she included the url for her blog. Miss Neville and I talked to her and explained why it would not be a good idea to include the link to her personal blog. Mrs. Neville has written to the parents about the blogs but there has not been time to talk about it. I wouldn’t want to give out her blog link unless her parents gave an OK. Now she said her mom worked with her on the blog. That’s great but this just underscores what we have all been talking about. It is absolutely imperative that we enter their world and talk about issues. There’s probably lots of kids around that have blogs but no guidance. Kids are inclined to just write everything. They just haven’t thought about it. I think they would respond well to guidance there. I know all the elementary kids I have worked with always add so much to the conversations. Both student and teacher learn so much. Take a look at their comments - the more I work with kids on blogs the more avenues I see for learning and expanding their thinking and writing through comments. Here we go again with the possiblities!

I’m traveling back to Miss Neville’s class in the morning. I was getting ready to post on the class blog and got sidetracked by comments. What blogger can resist reading comments? On the class blog the JHH fifth grade bloggers are welcoming these kids to the world of blogging. It is powerful. What I love is that they are firing away with questions- questions addressed to the group! I always encourage my groups to end up a blog post with a thought provoking question. Encourage the conversations. I saw good questions from this group. Angel asks “Why do you want to blog with your kids and why?” He gets right to the point. Great questions all around from this sharp little group.Once again I was sidetracked as I started reading their posts. I had to make a few comments.

I’ve blogged before about comments. They make such a difference It’s the connector for our students. It also provides so many teachable moments. It provides “thinkable” moments for them. Some of our best classroom discussions emerge from comments. We share together. We talk about ones that make us soar, ones that make us pause and rethink and we just enjoy sharing those delightful morsels of learning that occur. You can construct lessons around them You get a chance to foster higher level thinking on the blogs. They read a comment. Then they may read a comment that comments on the comment. They get lots of short quick practices with writing that is directed to them and therein it is highly relevant. Then they have to construct a combined meaning that comes about from thinking about what has been written to them in response to what they wrote. It’s such a good way to begin the process of teaching reflective thinking. I like to see the progress the students make. They start off with statements such as “I like this blog.” We get to expand their thinking and they begin to take note of the the delight of language and then reasons for writing become more apparent. They have ownership. I have been so fortunate to have crossed paths with so many wonderful people who take the time to comment on my student blogs as well as my own. I thank them from the bottom of my heart. You are the ones making a difference for our emerging writers/bloggers.

One of my goals was to be sure to write a comment a day. Many days I do more. I’m going to keep that goal and try to keep that goal to the forefront.

Last night I installed slickr on my home machine. I found out about this nifty screensaver from e-Clippings.

He is so right. I just

fun!

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I found this very interesting tip on Genuine Curiosity. It’s a cool tip for keeping track of comments you make. Dwayne Melancom, the author of Genuine Curiosity (I love that blog name!), points to the blog desparoz On The Go This author keeps track of comments he leaves on blogs by bookmarking the pages in del.icio.us and tagging the page with the tag “my comments”. Then he converts the RSS feed of the del.ici.us tag using the RSS-RDF Converter (which he discovered from Amy Gahran.) He shows his comments here.

Now this I like. I think I just need to have them in del.icio.us but wanted to share the other info. I’m going to also do one for comments received. Many times I have wanted to go back to a comment and the time it takes can be frustrating.