Bringing Blogging into the Classroom

Last week I introduced my students to the world of blogging.  In the county I teach in, the students have accounts on a program called My Big Campus.  This program allows for students to communicate and connect with teachers, classmates, and peers nation wide.  I decided last week to really explore what My Big Campus had to offer, the results were amazing!

I decided to try this program during reading.  My students are normally responding to text questions by using post-its, completing small projects, or written responses in their notebooks.  Instead, last week I decided to focus on creating discussion boards on My Big Campus for my students to enter their responses.  A few students were already familiar with this program, but many students had not taken the time to log in on their own.  So on the first day of using this program, as a class we took some time to learn how to get on the program, and enter their username, password, and school.  It was neat to see some of the students become 'tech experts' and help students navigate and log into the program.  Once all of my students were logged on and ready to post, they were so excited!  I couldn't believe how engaged they were, and wanting to explore the program.  As a class we discussed the expectations of how to respond on the discussion board, and what responses should look like.  On the first day, after students had read their text, a question was posted on the discussion board for students to post their response.  At the end of class, we took the time to read through some of the responses and discussed some praise and polish points.

The next few days the laptops were signed out for students to continue to post their responses onto the discussion boards.  Everyday there was a new discussion board ready for the students to enter into and respond to the question displayed.  I found out one of the great ways to differentiate the questioning was to provide multiple questions with varied levels of difficulty and either allowing students to choose which question to answer, or, assign students a specific questions to answer.  I also thought about creating multiple discussion boards so that each reading group could be assigned an area to respond and post.  This would allow each discussion board to be differentiated to meet the needs of each reading group.

Near the end of the week, we started talking about reading each others responses and adding comments.  Once again, as a class we took the time to discuss expectations when responding to classmate's posts, and how to create their comments.  One of the expectations that I emphasized the most was not only to create positive comments, but to also try to keep the conversation alive.  For example, if a student simply writes "good job!" where can the conversation go from there?  We discussed how to add onto posts so that students could continue to respond to one another by either asking each other questions about their responses, or providing additional information about the subject or topic.  The students had so much fun with this!

Overall, it was such an eye opening experience!  I was so pleased with the way the students responded, their engagement and curiosity, and developing and furthering their own learning and understanding of content.  I am looking forward to trying more things on My Big Campus. I think this is a great program that allows students the opportunity to explore the beginning stages of blogging, and allows teachers to effectively integrate blogging into the classroom.

To try out My Big Campus for yourself, check out this website http://www.mybigcampus.com/

For more information on bringing blogging into the classroom, check out these great websites:
http://educational-blogging.wikispaces.com/Curriculum+Examples
http://edublogs.org/curriculum-corner-using-a-blog-with-students/