Blogging and the Online Texbook
Hello Everyone,
Upon returning from our holiday vacation the students in our class have taken on two endeavors quite successfully. The first and foremost initiative has been our classroom blog. As mentioned in the previous post I introduced the blog format in the classroom with a round-robin writing activty using ancient Greek philosophical quotes. Students practiced reading a previous students' thoughts on an idea before developing his/her own and sharing it. Time in the school's computer room was spent reviewing previously established passwords and usernames for the blog found at classblogmeister.com. This particular site was chosen for its design for use in schools. Unlike the blog here at blogger.com, classblogmeister alllows teachers to establish a site and create passwords for students without the use of emails. The site also contains editing functions allowing teachers to preview posts, comment, and organize within the site for classroom use. While the shell of the website is not as intuitive as others, the students seem to have few problems navigating it.
During our first round of postings I have told the studnets that our goal is to have each student post an article properly following the "Instructions for posting on the blog" found on our classroom site. Of particular importance is the need to create their articles in a WORD document prior to posting. As they have been warned, classblogmeister has a timer that will log students off after several minutes of inactivity. If students explore the web to research and idea, use a thesaurus.... they could be logged off and lose their work. Creating their article in WORD also allows them to edit and save their articles in a folder in case they need to resubmit. Your help in reminding them to do this would be appreciated.
The second technological endeavor I began last week was an instructed use of the online textbook. While I began the year showing the studnets how to access the online textbook, I sensed that not many of them had explored it for assignments involving the text. Found at http://my.hrw.com the online textbook offers some wonderful features for the studnets. Once the children log in with their username and password (given in class and on a handout in their binder) they can access not only the textbook digitally, but they can also play the audio recording, have hyperlinked vocabulary defined and read to them for pronunciation, use support links for further exploration on topics, take sample quizes, and so on. The audio recording of the sections of reading can also be downloaded as an MP3 file to your computer at home and then uploaded to their iPOD or MP3 player so they can "Rock Out" to some ancient history reading in the car on the way to grandma's house!
The technology and the learning opportunities it offers the children is very exciting. It can also be overwhelming. Please email me if you would like to talk about the use of any of these devices, and most certainly I would love to have you comment here for others to read.
Have a wonderful day.
John Priest
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