Journaling with Early Childhood Education Majors
Tuesday, August 5th, 2003I just finished up with a good meeting with Lynne Jordan, an early childhood instructor. Last semester she used spiral bound notebooks for students to journal and respond to each other about the childrens’ literature books they were studying. She paired students and they would hand the books back and forth, responding to the other’s journal entry. She said the collection of all the books was a management nightmare. Enter EduBlogs!
Lynne and I brainstormed the “how-to’s” of setting it up. We are going to have different reading roles for the departments and these roles will be springboards to good discussion. The roles will be designed to invite different thinking and perspectives on the book. Depending on what book we use, it will be chapter by chapter or specific page assignments. It will be a student-led discussion group. The neat thing is that we can eliminate the paper, students can hear from more than one other students (many voices), and Bloglines will make the teacher and student’s life much simpler. Plus, these students are just a semester or two away from student-teaching so they can be thinking of student applications. Lynne and I are going to try to test-drive a few chapters ourselves on a weblog before we introduce it to the students. Hooray! I have an instructor who is ready to dive in herself and model it for the students! Who knows where this might lead?
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