4/07/2006

First Blogs

This week my students have completed their first blog comments and also posted their first blog entry. Several students have created good, thoughtful comments and posts. Others, despite some modeling and guidelines, created simple statements like "Nice Blog." Yesterday it might have sunk in more what was a good post and comment was when I used one of their own as a good example of a blog post and then we created a comment together in class. You can see it here at The Shootaround where the Detroit Piston, Rasheed Wallace's suspension for too many technicals was discussed.

If you search on gaggle.net's blogs for Negaunee Middle School, you can see several other of my students first blogging attempts. This link might also work. NMS Gaggle.net Blogs

I have started by having them blog about their own topics rather than responding to my own prompts. Hopefully this allows most of them the opportunity to express themselves freely in a positive manner. For some, though, this is too open I fear, and they will not be able to get going. Break is starting after today so hopefully during the next 8 days I can come up with something to get these others more engaged in writing in blogs. Let me know if you have any ideas/suggestions.