What do you look for in a website geared for teachers? What do you wish was out there, but you just can’t seem to find? I am just starting my own website, The Crafty Teacher, and I am looking for helpful ideas that I could add to the site. Fell free to check it out at http://craftyteacher.net and let me know what I could add. (It’s a little bare right now as I am just getting started!)
Here is my class’s Paul Bunyan project. I was impressed with thier pictures and I really think this is a great way to practice reading fluency. Please feel free to click the link below to view the video.
In my last post, I was feeling so frustrated with my students, but I’m starting to feel like they are coming along. Slowly, the fire is lighting in them and they are becoming more and more interested in the blog. It is so exciting to me that I will have a student finish an assignment early in class and the first thing they ask me is if they can go on my blog!
Wow! Who would have thought! I’m not sure that I have really captured all of their attention yet, but there are several students who are really getting into it and are even responding to their peers!
I am thinking that my next lesson with them in relation to the blog will be about posting comments that are complete thoughts and even planning what they want to say before they start writing. I am a little disappointed in my students use of English conventions, but I am hoping that this will improve with positive peer pressure.
So I introduced my students to our class blog today. It produced some interesting results. To be honest, I was really thinking that they would be totally into it and that some of them would already be familiar with blogs. I was pretty much wrong.
First, the kids didn’t have a clue as to what a blog was, and I’m not sure that I was as prepared as I should have been to explain it properly.
Second, while I think a few of the kids were into it, many of them weren’t interested at all. I think this has to do with two things. Partly because I have a disruptive student in my classroom who can convince the rest of my kids that what I teach is dumb. Partly because I think my students aren’t sure of what they should write.
Finally, the way most of them began with their responses really surprised me. They wrote as if they were participating in an IM chat. They didn’t use sentences, there were no capital letters – ANYWHERE, half of what they had to say didn’t really make much sense at all. Also, many of them insulted the idea of blogging all together in their comments, which really disappointed me.
I really wanted this blogging thing to be a fun, interesting learning experience, and I know my kids could get a lot out of it, but I knew things couldn’t continue like this. I thought about giving a lecture in proper blogging etiquette in class tomorrow, but instead sent them all an e-mail with some simple rules and guidelines for our blogging. I wanted to get the point across, but not in a lecture type of way. I am really hoping that this will help us move forward in a more positive direction from this point.
I’ve always wanted to have a blog, but until now, didn’t think I really had anything important to say. I’m still not sure that anyone will even read what I have to say. I was very excited at our district technology conference once I learned about edublogs and some great ways to use blogs in the classroom with students. As I left the conference, however, I was thinking about how nice it would be to have another forum. One for me to express myself as a general ed teacher trying so desperately to integrate technology into my classroom in a successful way.
The conference gave me so many things to think about. I think that the thought that is at the forefront of my mind is really this: how do I prepare my students for the world they will be entering as adults. I’m a fifth grade teacher, so I know they aren’t getting jobs next year, but I hate wasting their time on mindless facts and rote tasks when what they really need are skills to help them collaborate, communicate, and problem solve. I’m not saying that my students don’t need to know how to find facts or perform rote tasks at times, but should that really be all that their education is about? Should we as teachers really only be teaching them how to bubble for a test and find the one right answer? I think not.
