EduBlog Insights

I have a strong belief in the abilities of children. They are so much smarter than people give them credit. They love challenges and so often rise to the occasion and add their own understandings to the pool of knowledge. In the process they give us much to think about and learn. The best lessons come from the children themselves. We need to really listen to what they have to say. I am going to really focus on doing a better job here. I’m thinking along the line of maybe creating “Quotes from Children” and publishing them on my blog. It could come from their conversations, their blogs or their comments. I like this idea. My listening “ears” are on!

Children need to feel valued and safe to take risks in their thinking and writing. We need to honor their ideas. Their learning needs to be celebrated daily. We have to build a classroom climate that fosters this. The climate we build around the use of blogs in our classrooms is the cornerstone for a successful blogging learning experience.

An atmosphere that promotes and give-and-take between student and teacher, student and student, and also a give-and-take between the student, teacher, and those responding outside the classroom. Students need to feel free to write what they are really thinking but it is the teacher’s responsibility to guide them in responsible writing. We have to enter the process and counsel students on how to blog responsibly while maintaining their unique voice. Standards that you wish to follow as a group should be addressed. We talk about blogging in public spaces and how you need to use appropriate language, respectful dialogue, supportive comments, and how to be constructive without hurting someone’s feelings.

I use my class blog to be a springboard for classroom discussions prior to the students’ actual getting down to working on their blogs.

Here are a few samples of blog posts that I wrote. One of the strategies that has worked for me when blogging in the elementary schools is to share my post with students at the beginning of each session. I try to briefly summarize our previous session and enthusiastically point them to further heights. I try to model that type of blogging for them. I want to continue this.

Dare to Be Different

Boys and girls, you are something else! I like our brief discussion time before we head to the lab. It gives us a chance to talk and make connections to our learning. You are improving so much on your communication skills. REMEMBER, it is OK to be LOUD! You will not hear that from too many teachers so take advantage! Speak clearly, speak distinctly and SPEAK with conviction! It’s OK if your opinion is different. Dare to be different! That’s what keeps us engaged and learning. Toss those ideas out and we will have great discussions. All this will help us when we write on our weblogs.

Comment quality is going up!

I was really proud of all of you at Thursday’s session. You have really “bumped up” the quality of your comments and are truly helping each other. Editing is hard work but you just rolled up your sleeves and went right to work. Having to really think about another person’s writing other than your own is helpful for your own writing. It gets you thinking about lots of ways you can improve. That’s what we are striving to accomplish. So, congrats on the quality of your comments - much more important than quantity. Yeah, I know you like quantity, too. I hear you! We’ll work on getting a good mix of both.

I post these excerpts because I want to do more of this with my upcoming project. This thinkpiece will be my reminder.

I also refer to their blogs a lot in the class blog like my reference here to Ashley’s post.

Spill the Beans!!!!!!!!

Ashley posted about Spill the Beans and she has gotten lots of comments about her writing. Why she is the first one to hear from author Pat Street. Wow! I’m going to have Ashley read Pat Street’s comment so everyone can enjoy it.

Now we all know that the meaning of spill the beans is to give away a secret to someone who is not supposed to know it. Pat Street shared the origin of “letting the cat out of the bag” but was not sure of the origin of “spill the beans”.

I checked in our favorite dictionary, the Scholastic Dictionary of Idioms by Marvin Terban. Here it is straight from the book:

A popular theory about the origin of this idiom goes back to the ancient Greeks and their secret societies. People voted you into these clubs by putting a white bean or a black bean into a jar (white = yes; black = no). The beans were supposed to be counted in secret, but if somebody accidentally (or purposefully) knocked over the jar and spilled the beans, the secret vote would be revealed. Another theory holds that this is an example of American slang from the early 1900s that combined two old words, “spill” (meaning “talk,” from the 1500s) and “beans” (meaning “information,” from the 1200s), into a new phrase.

See how much we learn by blogging!

This year I am going to try to build in more time fostering this aspect. I am going to continue this but work at building in time to have the students comment more on each other’s posts and make connections to them. Classroom dynamics are crucial cornerstones for building a blogging learning community!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006 at 11:17 am and is filed under Thinkpiece. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.