Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Bloggers Meeting -- Tuesday Feb. 21

Claire and Kristen have now posted 21 student blog entries. They are seeing a lot of student enthusiasm. The students really want to write pieces to put on their blog. The teachers came up with an editing rubric, which the students have to use to get their work published. They are finding that the students are really investing their energy and time to show the teachers quality work in order to get published. So the teachers are seeing a lot of quality work and motivation. The students are realizing they can't just post anything on the blog. There's a lot of hard work and dedication that goes into it first. The students then read their blog posts to the class on the Smartboard, which helps with fluency. This also generates pride in their work and makes other students want to do it, as well.
Thanks to Bob Rowan's help, Kristen and Claire figured out how to allow people (meaning parents) to comment on student blog posts. The teachers first will approve the comments before they go up. 
Claire and Kristen  are now going to play around with adding color and photos to blog entries.
http://www.fourthgradewritingwizards.blogspot.com/

Jeff has posted more than a dozen student blog entries so far on a wide variety of topics, from movie reviews to observations about Woodlynde and their own lives outside of school. These are primarily from his freshman journalism class. Students are working on more blog entries as of this writing. The students seem to enjoy the process and like seeing their work posted. It has worked out really well for Jeff, because he can have his students blog while they are in between major journalism assignments. Jeff has figured out how to also post pictures with the blog entries, so he is putting up a photo of the student who has written the entry. New blog posts are advertised on the Informer's Facebook Fan page and there is also a notification of the site on the Informer's website. One of the blog posts received a student comment.
His goal is to make sure every journalism elective student has at least one blog post, then to continue expanding the effort into his other journalism classes.
http://woodlyndeinformer.blogspot.com 



Claire, Kristen and Jeff hope that more people will read the blog entries and comment on them.

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Bloggers Meeting -- Tuesday Jan. 10

We just figured out how to alter the font color and add photos to the blogs. Very exciting!

Claire and Kristen continue to add student work to their blog, which is an ongoing goal. They are most impressed by how excited the students are about writing and seeing work on the blog -- along with choosing their topics. The students have shown great improvement in their writing (sentence structure, organizing their thoughts, paragraph writing and editing).
http://www.fourthgradewritingwizards.blogspot.com/

Jeff continues to post work by his 9th grade journalism students on the Informer blog. They are really enjoying seeing their work in print on a regular basis. It's a nice way for them to write about their thoughts and opinions on a variety of subject matter without having to go through the vigorous revising and editing process for articles that appear in the Informer. For the blog posts, they generally write about a topic (Woodlynde related or something that's interesting or bothering them in the real world) and then they sit down with me to edit it. My goal is to not only continue to have these 9 students blog but to expand the blog to my other journalism students.
http://woodlyndeinformer.blogspot.com/