After discussing the blog with Carolyn, we decided it would be inappropriate for us to edit the blog. We found the comments to be quite personal and to tamper with that would diminish the authenticity of the blog. For us, the blog is more of an ongoing dialogue among teachers than a published website with interesting facts that we can share with our students. It could potentially be used as an example, but it would have to become something else if we wanted it to be a resource for students.
Things that were useful from the blog that we can use in the classroom were the initial requirements that were labeled on the site: 1. The essential question 2. Asking for the historical context of the assigned monuments with accompanying visuals and 3. Reflecting on each other's work.
One suggestion for improvement would be requiring students to reflect on the day of the actual visit in order to have a more immediate/ fresh response. After conducting some research I came across these helpful suggestions... (below, is a modified version of what I found)
1. Decide the Main Use for Your Blog and be clear about its purpose
2. How you structure classroom blogs depends on its utility. Here are various approaches:
a. Classroom management: Use a blog to post assignments, handouts, and notices. You can also put up study notes and have students take turns summarizing what happened in school that day.
b. Learning journal: uses individual or small-group blogs as a place for students to "write reflectively" on what they learned from a particular assignment and how they might do better next time.
c. Class discussion: set up a single blog for the whole class. You may post entries for discussion, or have individual students and guest bloggers post entries.
d. Use blogs to post homework for traditional evaluation but with the added component that students must choose a follow classmate's entry and compose their response to what they have read.
In all cases, it will be important to decide in advance how the work will be graded.
We are interested in hearing your feedback in order to better implement this tool with our students. Please post a comment.
Thanks!
Cindy
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I agree with Cindy that the blog would not be an authentic work product if editing had taken place. I would have liked it if there had been an opportunity to allow teachers time to explore the monument or space on their own before we had tours and formal activities. It would be more genuine if they did that and then reflected after the activity and put it on the blog also. It's important to remember that while we might know the history behind many of these sites, that there were people who were only seeing some of them in person for the first time. The other thing that might be helpful would be to have some brief conversation about adding music, images and formatting. I realize time did not permit it for our purposes and most of our students could probably do it on their own. A final idea would be to have some sort of free write on the blog in terms of D.C. as a whole or a general discussion board about our experiences.
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