Chapter 3 was a quick and easy run through how to best use blogs in the classroom and a listing of some possible blogging sites to check out. I am still wondering what the difference is between what I am doing with my Edmodo site and what Richardson is describing when he discusses classroom blogs. The Edmodo site allows me to provide security for my students- no one is going to read what they write but me. There are, of course, positives and negatives to this. As Richardson writes, blogging provides good practice of "writing for an audience." The Edmodo site doesn't let my students write for an audience, which can, in some cases, help their writing. It also gives value to the assignment- it exists in the real world- not just as an assignment for the teacher. The negative, of course, is the whole online safety issue. I've seen first-hand how easy it is for (creepy) adults to attempt to contact (who they believe are) students. That experience has made me wary of allowing any of my students to have a "public" presence.
What I did like in this chapter was the very detailed explanation of how best to introduce students to blogging. Richardson suggests that teachers themselves create their own blogs, so that they have experience with what they are teaching. My questions, when reading this, centered around what I would blog about. Would I blog about my classes? Interesting classroom discussions? My own personal pleasure reading? And who would constitute the audience? If I made my blog public, who the heck would want to read about my experiences in class? So many questions! All of those possibilities seem to me to be content either not worth publishing, or else I would update so infrequently that it would deem the practice useless (or at least unnecessary at best).
My last thought about the chapter has to do with Richardson's claim that "Giving each student a Weblog basically means a paperless classroom." The idea of this is so very appealing, but I think the reality is a pipe dream. There are so many essays and papers in the English classroom, and I would find it very difficult, if not impossible, to correct essays/papers that were turned in solely online. It may be possible, and I may just be psyching myself out here, but the idea of doing corrections on an essay or paper online makes me shudder. Correcting would take double the time it takes to do now. If I had a tablet and stylus and could actually write corrections on the paper, I would consider doing that... but for now, let's just keep the paper in the classroom! :)
No comments:
Post a Comment