Reflection on Blogging

Okay....so I am really excited about this whole idea of blogging. It has so many possibilities for the classroom. I think this summer I would like to see how I can use blogs in my classroom with reading and writing. I think I need some time to kind of digest all this information and then set everything up the way I want. I think it would be a great way to publish student work. For example, we did a writing project in the beginning of the year and I would have loved to have been able to put them on a blog so that students could read and comment on each other's work. I have seen that a lot of teachers are using them for poetry, so maybe I'll try to get my feet wet by doing something with that this year. I can also see that kids would think the whole idea of blogging is cool. It would probably be a great motivator because students usually like anything that they can do on the computer. This makes me wish I had computers in my room all the time!

Great Blog

I read a blog today about the book The Secret Life of Bees. It looked like it was a blog that incorporated student feedback about the book. It looked like the different posts were assignments that the students had to do based on their reading. For each chapter they had to create a summary or talk about the highlights, discuss the use of symbols, and create some artwork depicting events or themes in the novel. There was even a parent blog that I thought was great. It was called The Secret Life of Bees Parent Blog. I think the idea is that parents can read the same novel and comment on the book as well. What a great way to get parents invovled in great discussions about books with their kids.