Being part of the 21st century and living in this always evolving technology generation is a pretty awesome thing! I feel as if I could honestly learn something new everyday of my life off of the internet. As teachers, having the World Wide Web is such a valuable aspect to education, especially when utilized effectively in the classroom. Being in a district that provides students with 1:1 iPads, I absolutely take advantage of the benefits digital devices with network connection provide my classroom. It certainly takes work on my end to stay up to date, and do my best to learn new practices as technology continues to develop and grow. However, the benefits are well worth it.
After some research on the possibilities and benefits of blogging, I truly would like to incorporate blogging into my curriculum. Where there are many ways one could use blogging, both for personal development and classroom practices, having students construct and post short book reviews fits into my curriculum perfectly! I teach at the elementary/middle school level, thus I encourage reading throughout each year by tracking our overall classroom progress with a tracking chart. It’s actually a cool tracking chart that I made in undergraduate work many years ago of a mountain and a little hiker dude that treks up the mountain as students complete books. Students can earn parties when reaching camp 1, 2, and the summit. Anyways, I have students complete a short book review worksheet that I check and give credit for completion. By having students simply blog their book reviews, not only would the book review be easier for me to look at, but other students could read the reviews as well. Thus, helping my classroom become that much more student centered.
Throughout the school year, I always try to incorporate current event work. I like to add in speaking and presentation skills with the current event work as well. I provide students with an organization template that allows for them to summarize their articles they read. Once their research is complete, students present their article and their thoughts to the class. In future years, instead of just having students present their finding to the class I want to introduce blogging their thoughts and summaries of the current event articles as well. Students can then present to the class using their blog on the overhead, or students could check out other students’ blogs and comment on their posts…etc. It should be interesting to see the growth of students’ posts from the beginning of the year to the end.
Whether you are a classroom teacher, library media specialist, or any other special area educator incorporating blogging into your curriculum can be a great way to work on English language arts skills, technology skills, and collaboration skills. More importantly, students are learning to become content creators rather than simply consumers. As stated by Broad (2015), “Engaging students in activities that align closely to higher-order thinking skills like creating, evaluating and synthesizing certainly seems more transformative than asking them to search for information on the internet.” Being content creators rather than passive consumers allows our students to truly engage in a relevant and rigorous task, ultimately allowing them to gain experience in 21st century skills. Such 21st century skills can be very important for their college and career success. Some free resources to start such blogging adventures are as follows: Blogger, WordPress, and Weebly.
Get out there and start blogging, or don't, totally up to you, but I definitely am!
References
Broad, S. (2015). Creators, not consumers. Education Technology. Retrieved from http://edtechnology.co.uk/Article/creators-not-consumers.
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