I was thinking about how to use the blog as a teaching tool. One way in which the blog could be used as a teaching tool: putting the class notes up on a daily basis. Parents could review the notes on a daily basis. Parents could view the blog to see what was being discussed in the classroom. This would keep the parents informed of what and when topics are being discussed in class.
Also, as a teacher you could post assignments and due dates on the blog. This would enable parents to find out if their child completed the assignments and handed them in. The blog would need to be linked to a gmail account. This would allow correspondance between the parents and the teacher and maintain the privacy between the parent, student and teacher.
When students are sick or they are out of town, this would allow for the students to stay in touch with the classroom and assignments. The google documents could be used as a way for students to submit assignments for a course. The students could use the blog to ask questions for clarification when uncertain of what the material being discussed is unclear.
I do realize that this could become cumbersome for teachers, especially at the the high school level, who have four or five classes with thirty or more students in a course. The time factor would become a major concern. It would take a huge commitment on the part of the teacher to keep up with the demands. To provide this in conjunction with a course could be a useful tool, but the how would still need to be worked out.
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Great comments Tom and some good ideas about how you could apply the tools in practice. Communication with students and parents is the key for sure. Not everyone can make to school for a parent night and a class blog would go along way to keeping everybody informed and on side.
Pretty soon we will start talking about some other tools that can be used to organize all these tasks. It looks cumbersome and a huge time commitment but once you set up some pretty simple tools you can track a very large number of inputs with relative ease.
The news aggreator or feed reader is one of the biggies in this regard. Bloglines or Google Reader are two that I recommend.
I post my homework on my Gr.7 site daily, but I polled my students and not one of them checks this.
Well said Thomas and I do agree. It took me awhile to figure out who Thomas Theburntone was but finally I clued in…
I’ve kept a web page for my classes for many years now. If I have an instruction handout I put it online in .pdf format and if I have handouts they go up that way also. Other than that my instructions for the class are more like what I would write on the board for an assignment or what would be written in my daybook for a sub. Definitely it means not having to make extra copies of assignments for students and for students who are away they can keep in touch with classwork. I’ve found that when students have a due date they like to be able to download the worksheets that they’ve forgotten at school. Once you get in the habit of posting during or at the end of the class it’s not so hard to keep up. When I’m planning my week I post as much as I know at that time and then just keep editing it as we move through the week. I have a main page with the current week of school days and the classes in each day and then I have links to the class archives where I move the assignments into their own respective courses and keep everything archived but available for the semester (good for those long overdue assignments.) I don’t post who is finished or not but I distribute frequent progress reports from the electronic gradebook so that students can see what they’re missing and what effect it’s having on their grade (motivational for some.) If Jing files can be compressed so that they don’t take too much memory they would be a good way to record a lesson done with the computer or perhaps as a podcast for those students who have missed the class or who need a refresher. The problem will be the amount of memory that these lessons would require.
You have an excellent idea. My students can’t access a gmail account at the school but they can do it at home. So if we have the students creating a gmail account we could post newsletters and announcements to them.
Keeping students informed is the main goal of my blog at school. I am trying to post the lesson and even have taped two of my lessons so that students are able to catch up on stuff they have missed if they are sick or otherwise away from school. It is a steep learning curve but I see the benefits of it to be overwhelming. I think the hard part will be to keep the energy going. It is always easy at the start but the keep is to keep going after a while.
I also have maintained a “homework” page for my students. As others have commented, I, too, put assignments on my site. I usually hand out one paper copy to get students started, but if they lose it, forget it, feed it to a pet, etc. then they can get another from the “homework” page. It is also valuable for due dates for assignments.
I include other useful links.
Best of all, is I tell my students once when something is due. After that I say “Check the homework page”. They now know that is my stock answer and say it to anyone who asks the question!
Just dropping by to say hello… I’ve been running through my blogline information, manged to add it to my tool bar and am still trying to figure out how to mark, add, and retrieve that which I want make my own until I want to or am able to share it that is…
I was noticing with this one it is fairly easy to access some that stuff on the darkside of the equation: it’s kinda like the virus with no cure…
Later: DUH! Mader without the DUH!
We are trying to implement a homework page on our “intranet” (internal internet) which our students can access after school or during evening study hour. (about 240 students live here on campus) Each teacher has a webpage that students can access. I have a weekly schedule with links to any handouts or lesson assignments. Students can view or print these out. All of our teachers have had a number of PD sessions on how to construct these webpages and links. About 3/4 of the teachers use them, and I am told that students like to access these pages.