My project has been to set up a blog with my third grade students. I wanted to find a way to motivate my students share thoughts and ideas about stories we read in class. This year I have had a large reading group and felt that they are not all getting the opportunity to share their ideas and thoughts. So a blog seemed like a good way to let all students respond and be able to read what the other students thought. I have had the students respond to three differents prompts and comment back to each other.
I have run into several bumps on the road to a great blog. The first problem I had was finding a nice kid and teacher friendly site. I tryed several before I settled on kid blogs.com. This site was one of the only that I looked at that each student did not need an email address. All I had to do was set up a username and password. Another bump came later and it came just from not enough modeling on my part. The student's posts and comments were simple and not what I was expecting of them. I had to go over my expecations several times. I also had trouble with students just commenting to make themselves look popular. It was becoming a competition. So I had to set up a limit on the number of comments a person could have. So each student must have 4 comments before they can go back and make more. This helped make everyone feel important as well. No one was being left out.
I plan to start my blog back up this week after having to stop for our state testing. I will most likely have to model and go over my expectations yet again. I am hoping for the best. If you would like to see my blog you are welcome to do so. Just log in as Parent and type in the password: thirdgrade
http://kidblog.org/huskypupadventures/wp-login.php
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I logged on as a parent and read through some of your students' blogs. Looks good! It cracks me up some of the things they write. Seems like PAWS is a nerve wrecking thing for them.
ReplyDeleteWell it is their first time. They don't really know what it is going to be like so they are all really nervous until they start. Once they start they realize that it is not as hard as they thought. It was funny those as we were finishing the PAWS they said they wanted to do more. The reason was because they got extra snacks and gum. :)
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