In September, my cooperating teacher and I will begin our journey into blogging with our third-grade class.
Our first language arts unit, Launching the Reading and Writing Workshop, is a great place to begin blogging. Our authentic learning unit is based on the idea that we all need to become better readers and writers because it will impact our lives, whether we want to be astronauts, professional athletes, or anything else. The task is to create a guide to becoming either a better reader or writer and share it on our blog. The guide can take many forms: a poster, an essay, a poem, a graphic with captions, or another expression. Students will type or otherwise digitize their guide, and I will post it while they observe. Students will take on the responsibility to post directly to the class blog later in the school year.
Blogging will create a felt-need for students to do their best work. Richardson (2010) found that the additional audience provided by public media stimulates students to consider their work more carefully. When students know that other students around the world, as well as their parents, past and future teachers, and others will see their work, they feel it is of greater importance. Mills and Exley (2014) found that students using blogging and other educational technology spent more time on the technology initially, but in the end spent a greater amount of time on the writing. Blogging has many educational benefits.
Two of the most important benefits are that students are more engaged in the work that will be on the blog and gives them a voice to improve themselves and the world around them. Our class blogging meets ISTE (2016) standards by using technology to make students empowered learners (#1) and knowledge constructors (#3). Our plan for blogging meets ISTE (2008) standards for teachers #1 to facilitate and inspire student learning and creativity and #2 design and develop digital age learning experiences and assessments.
I am a regular ed teacher team teaching with a special education teacher. We will have 20 third grade students, almost half of whom have learning disabilities. Several have poor executive function skills compared to their peers.
Follow my journey into learning as we begin blogging by posting ideas on how to be a better reader or writer.
References
International Society for Technology in Education. (2016). Standards for students. Retrieved from http://www.iste.org/standards/standards/for-students-2016
International Society for Technology in Education. (2008). Standards for teachers. Retrieved from http://www.iste.org/standards/for-students
Mills, K. A., & Exley, B. (2014). Time, Space, and Text in the Elementary School Digital Writing Classroom. Written Communication, 31(4), 434-469. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org.ezp.waldenulibrary.org/10.1177/0741088314542757
Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms (3rd ed.) [Kindle Edition]. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.
