Week 1 Reflection...

Weblogs, Blogs, and my new gmail account have kept me busy this week. I really wish that I could incorporate blogs into my curriculum in the near future, but after an interesting week on the technology front at my school, I don’t see that happening any time soon. The idea of a blog seems to be what I already can create in the form of a conversation in my classroom after we’re done reading a story or chapters from the class novel. Posing questions to a class on a blog would be less interactive than an actual conversation.
I read a slew of blogs this week to see what was out there. Everything from sports and entertainment blogs to my best friend’s blog, the infamous Ken Krayeske who asked Jim Calhoun about his salary this time last basketball season. And the one thing that held true amongst most of them were that the comments that followed the blog all seemed to be dated hours apart from each other, sometimes days, whereas a conversation that I would have with my students not only could be accomplished in “real-time” but would also let me steer the conversation in certain ways when need be.
I do think that blogs would be a great creative outlet for students and a place for the more soft spoken classmates to feel more comfortable participating and sharing their ideas. I’ve spent so much time arguing about how we use the technology in our school to prepare students for CMT tests that they’ll ultimately take with a pencil and paper, I hope that all the new ideas I go to her with won’t seem to far out there. I think that the best use for blogging amongst my students would be to share new information that they encounter for the connections that many are lacking because of an insufficient amount of meaningful prior knowledge. I mean that in the nicest way….really. They love to read and learn new things, but many of the 7th graders I’ve taught have had real difficulties making valid connections with the type of vivid imagery and details that would knock the scorer’s pants off. If students were given a few guidelines and the proper websites to start at, the possibilities of where their minds could take them, and in turn where they could take their classmates would be meaningful learning experiences that they could all share with each other.
The blog could ultimately be a place where they could share ideas and give suggestions to classmates that might otherwise hold their comments to themselves in class. A blog would give them some time to digest their thoughts on the different topics before responding to any of their classmates. The blog could make it more on their time.