Welcome to my new blog! I am currently enrolled in a course at the University of St. Thomas called Introduction to Technology Tools and Effective Learning. As a part of the course I will be keeping this blog and sharing technology tools, tips, suggestions and thoughts. I hope this information is helpful to all you other teachers out there.
This week for class we read several articles that suggest how to use blogs in the classroom for student engagement and learning. So along those lines, I wanted to share with you a blog (in progress) that I started last spring for my brother who had just moved off to college. The transition from big guy on high school campus to little fish in the big sea was tough. We have these matching monkeys from childhood and I started to send him funny pictures of my monkey doing interesting things to help give him reminders of home and brighten his day. He started sending me pictures back. I decided to catalog them on a blog for just the two of us because I have all these funny monkey pictures in my email and on my camera phone that the two of us have taken and I wanted to start putting them in once place. Check out the site for some laughs: Some Silly Monkeys.
Anyways, I initial created the Monkey Blog for just the two of us. However, after thinking about starting a blog for this course and thinking about how I could use blogs in the classroom, I think the Monkey site is a good place to start. Using the Flat Stanley Project as a model (for those of you that are unfamiliar - www.flatstanley.com), students from different classrooms could show how they were working on a particular social studies unit, post updates and share that with other classes in their school or other classes in another state or even country! Both classes could contribute, share information, or the teachers could even make something a competition. This would be a great way for students to not only learn new social studies content (or math, science, English, you name it), practice typing skills, and use technology to connect with other students.
I like the idea of students collaborating on the web, much like teachers are nowadays (case in point = this class). I especially like the ability for students from different classrooms to share what they have learned. Whether they have the same teacher in a different hour or a different teacher altogether. It provides the students with the ability to "pop in" on a different setting and see how the classes differ. I know throughout the day that I touch on things in a certain class that I will not touch on in another class. What a resource.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing.
Oh yea, and the somesillymonkeys seems like the garden gnome of the future - good stuff.
HI Heather, this definitely can be a good start for inter-school or international collaboration. I used to work with a middle school teacher to bring her students to participate in international collaborations. One example was that students talked about what they like about their schools and post pictures to a secure website. Another example was to compare shopping malls in different countries. The possibilities are endless.
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