WOW! What an amazing idea to have a classroom website for all students, parents and teachers to access. My blog today is going to concentrate on exploring the concept of a classroom website and blogs, stemming from exploring the 2M Gems website. The class 2M Gems blogging began in 2008 created by their teacher Amanda Marrinan. Each year Amanda introduces her class into blogging within the classroom. The class has three blogs: writing blog, reading blog and blogger café.
The classes reading blog is where they post about books that they are reading. They post comments, book reviews and recommend other books they think their peers would enjoy reading. The writing blog is used for students to write freely and independently. It can cover anything from what they are learning to what they are doing on the weekend.
Introducing a blogging atmosphere into the classroom has a many benefits:
· Highly motivates students, especially those who otherwise might not become
participantsin the classroom
participantsin the classroom
· Excellent opportunities for students to read and write
· Effective forums for collaboration and discussion
· Powerful tools to enable scaffolding learning or mentoring to occur
(Nguyen, 2011, p.1)
As students learn a lot, if not more outside of the classroom environment, why should we keep the classroom and home separate? Having a classroom website and blog also brings the classroom into the home. Parents can have access to their children’s learning and progress throughout the year. Rather than having children answer ‘nothing’ to the question, what did you learn in school today? A daily updated classroom blog keeps, “parents well-informed of skills and lessons being taught within the classroom, we are enabling the parents to reinforce what is taught during school at home” (Ronaghan, 2010, p.1). For those parents who are not aware of the concept of blogging or ‘posting’ comments on blogs, Amanda Marrinan employs the great idea of using the orientation meeting with the parents in the first week of the school year to tutor the parents about the blogging world in her classroom.
Amongst all the learning benefits that students are getting from having a classroom blog they also learn lifelong skills of being safe online. The students learn that they are not allowed to post their last name, mention passwords or their address; they are not allowed to describe what they look like or match a photo with their name.
I personally think that this is a wonderful idea to employ into the classroom! I cannot think of a better way to involve the parents in the classroom, get the students excited about writing and reading and encouraging the students to be technological learners. By having a class website and blog it demonstrates how, “ICT can be used to benefit teaching and learning and is most effective when used in the context of learning and not as an end itself” (DOE, 2011, p.1). This teacher is demonstrating a real life effective example of the TPACK model within the classroom.
Having a classroom blog is so 21st century learning.
Reference List Nguyen, T. (2011). Blogs in education. Retrieved March 18, 2011, from http://thanhnguyen75.blogspot.com/2006/11/use-of-blogs-in-education_14.html Queensland Government. (2011). Smart classrooms professional development framework. Retrieved April 19, 2011, from http://education.qld.gov.au/smartclassrooms/ pdframework/ictc/indicators.html Ronaghan, D. (2010). Bringing the classroom into the home. Retrieved March 18, 2011, from http://community.prometheanplanet.com/en/blog/b/blog/archive/2010/12/06/ bringing-the-classroom-into-the-home.aspx |
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