Blogging

One of the things that I have done over the past couple of weeks is to get my students blogging. Most of them have had little or no experience at all in the blogging world so I have started slow with them and kept it simple. In my computer essentials (basic computers) and keyboarding classes I have changed my weekly written assignment to a post each week. Students have just started to realize how important it is to read all the other comments to the blog and implement them into their response. I have been really pleased with how the posts have been going. I hope to add a bit more blogging next semester. My hope is to get students to read a blog about something they are interested in and start contributing to it. Does anyone have experience with that? I'd be interested in hearing other people's experience.

Here are the links to the two classroom blogs that my kids are contributing to:

Computer Essentials
Keyboarding

I love Animoto

Over the past week I have shown my students how to use this and they have just gone crazy for it.

Wiki Update

Well, my kids really got into using the wiki. Since my assignment was really basic...recreate the school's web site using a wiki...I found that my students still just wanted to make a static website but in the form of a wiki. But truly, I think that is just because of the way I shaped the assignment. So I will give them another assignment with a wiki that will guide them in a more collaborative direction. Hopefully giving them some basic experience with a wiki will allow them to go further with the next assignment. I have not framed the assignment yet, so I'll let you know when I get to that.

If anyone has any ideas let me know.

Here is the link to the wiki. Notice that students used Animoto to add some videos to the site. I feel like it was a bit much, but the kids had a lot of fun creating them, so I went with it.

So, I guess it wasn't totally successful, but in the end I'm glad I started showing the students how to use a wiki and have them talk about wikis and how they can be used. I had them post their thoughts on a class blog too...check it out.