Amazon.com sent me a recommendation for books I might like based on some of my previous searching/purchases. I wasn't extremely interested in the book suggested, but it did lead me to some titles that piqued my interest: Redefining Literacy 2.0 and Moodle Teaching Techniques.
Since one of our school districts uses Moodle and currently doesn't allow teachers or students access to other blogging and wiki sites maybe we need to explore how and what Moodle has to offer so that we can support those teachers with similar activities adapted to the Moodle platform.
Getting participants to blog....
I don't think it should be this hard...we are asking participants (classroom teachers) to blog twice a month about what technology they are using, how it's going, what they are learning from the implementation, what problems they are having, if they want help... I don't know why there seem to only be about 3 teachers (out of 34 or so) that are doing this??? I eventually post comments on those that post...I feel like I've sent out the same e-mail too many times, so maybe it's time to take a new approach.
I think that I might send out another e-mail with, lets say, three specific questions we want answered before Thanksgiving. This assignment should take no more than 15 minutes of their time, even if they have to do the blogging at home I think this is a reasonable request!
Another idea is to do individualized e-mails to each participant that has not been blogging....
At least many of them responded to my request for which textbooks they are using.
I think that I might send out another e-mail with, lets say, three specific questions we want answered before Thanksgiving. This assignment should take no more than 15 minutes of their time, even if they have to do the blogging at home I think this is a reasonable request!
Another idea is to do individualized e-mails to each participant that has not been blogging....
At least many of them responded to my request for which textbooks they are using.
November 1st
Hoping that the reminder to blog twice a month helps with getting some current responses from some of our Teaching Math in a Technical World (TMTW) participants. I did get a fair number of replies to my "what text books are you using?" e-mail. those that I have not heard of at all it might be time to e-mail them a personal note asking how things are going.
I played around with Edublogs a little bit and think that it could be a very good platform for jr high/high school teachers to use that is "more secure" or "private". I may set up a "dummy" class and see how it looks and works...
That's all for now...
I played around with Edublogs a little bit and think that it could be a very good platform for jr high/high school teachers to use that is "more secure" or "private". I may set up a "dummy" class and see how it looks and works...
That's all for now...
Test bloggers starting Thursday
So I met with the teacher who has agreed to have his fifth grade class test this blogging idea. He is going to use the NSD blog feature of his class web page and secure it with a password and post a couple of questions for the students to answer using the comment feature. For the fifth grade (elementary) this is more practical for the teacher with only 25 students. Eventually, he would like each student to begin a blog to replace the current paper Reading Response Journals that he currently totes around to read and reply to students. The student's individual blogs will be perfect for this purpose.
Problems with teachers blogging
Teachers either have no extra time to blog in their day or week OR they have no access to their blog sites at school so they have to do it at home. And who likes to do more work when they get home??
Therefore, getting feedback is difficult...it is actually easier for them to e-mail a reply back to my e-mail reminding them to blog... so now I have e-mail messages to keep organized!
Therefore, getting feedback is difficult...it is actually easier for them to e-mail a reply back to my e-mail reminding them to blog... so now I have e-mail messages to keep organized!
test bloggers coming soon!
Today I talked with Megan's teacher and we are going to try and have the kids keep an electronic math journal with a blog...so I have a little work to do:
*IRB training and form
*get access to edublogs or some other NSD approved blog site
*figure out how/who will set up the blogs (kids or teachers)
*create a first lesson to teach the kids about blogging responsibly, how to do it, and what to blog about
* whatever else we think of
This class is 5th grade so it will be interesting to see how it works on the lower end of the age spectrum! I'm excited to go in the classroom and help out too!
*IRB training and form
*get access to edublogs or some other NSD approved blog site
*figure out how/who will set up the blogs (kids or teachers)
*create a first lesson to teach the kids about blogging responsibly, how to do it, and what to blog about
* whatever else we think of
This class is 5th grade so it will be interesting to see how it works on the lower end of the age spectrum! I'm excited to go in the classroom and help out too!
I made this graph at the Create A Graph site ( http://nces.ed.gov/nceskids/createagraph/default.aspx ) and e-mailed it to myself!! I could have saved it too....or even better I should put it in a drop box on drop.io!! I could have put cool labels and legends on the graph if I had real data that I wanted to tell a story, but I was just testing what it looked like and what I could do with it!