New Idea

I get The Reading Teacher journal routed to me at school. I got the March 2008 issue this week and to my great delight one of the articles was entitled "Collaborate Literacy: Blogs and Internet Projects". I quickly found the article and began reading. The first part of the article was how a teacher used blogging in her classroom. The second part of the article was how a group of teachers worked together to create an Internet project for their classrooms. The whole article was very interesting, but I was especially captivated by the blogging idea. The teacher created a classroom blog hosted by Jefferson Bear. Jefferson Bear regularly posted questions for the kids in the class to respond to and provide feedback to their responses. I think this is a great idea. The questions that the kids respond to could be on a academic topic you are working on in class or a social issue that needs to be addressed. This kind of blogging wouldn't take much time out of the day because students would probably need to go to the computer lab about once a week or so to answer the question, plus they could work as partners if they wanted to. I also loved the fact that the classroom blog was hosted by "Jefferson Bear" and not the teacher. That reminded me of the teddy bear blogging that Deb and I responded to in an article earlier this semester. This idea seemed a little more practical for me and something I could actually see myself setting up in my classroom.