Now Entering the Blogosphere

I had posted in my very first blog that I really did not want to get into blogging as a way to spite the man and what seemed to be a trend. Well, obviously I have given up on that idea and moved on to spiting the man with not doing Twitter. Seriously whose life could be that crazy that we need to follow every move? I love my life, I would rather be no other place than here but there is no way any one person's life could be that interesting to follow every single step!

Anyway with my capitulation into the blogosphere I have really come to see that this is a very POWERFUL tool that can be used in education. I am in the middle of setting up my first class blog project that will span the remaining weeks of the school year in my U.S. History class. I have composed a big trans-historical question that students must continually revisit every unit with a blog post. I want students to think about what does it mean to be American? I really try to hammer home to students that history makes us who we are. If that is true then we need to reflect on our country's past to better understand ourselves. What I will have the students do is use stories and developments in our history to compose their own fluid concept of what it means to be an American: good, bad, selfish, selfless, greedy, giving etc... During the last two weeks of the school year I will have students reflect back on their blogs and create a project that illustrates what it means for them to be American based off our historical identity.

I believe this project will really kill several birds with one stone. I think this will give kids a little more ownership over their learning. Most importantly it will give them a purpose as to why it is important to understand what is going on in U.S. history. Finally it will give some cohesion between the historical eras, students will make connections of ideas as opposed to memorizing individual compartmentalized facts and ideas.

I think where so many history teachers go wrong is with this accomplishing individual tasks that don't seem to connect. Students see these tasks as hoops to jump through without any critical thinking as to how the task can be used later in life. Teacher use of blogs is sometimes similar to this as well. Teachers will use blogs to answer one particular question, this leads to dead thoughts that go no where, blogs are supposed to be an archive of the fluid change of an individual's ideas. We want a better cohesive idea that gives us a better understanding of life. Blogs are great because its so easy to go back to previous posts to reflect and also get other people's insight on your ideas. In an essence its a way to better get to know yourself with the aid of a global community. If teachers don't use them in this way blogs are just another gimmick to do the same old thing!

Wikis

Okay, so for some reason I cannot paste a screen shot on here so I guess Ill go with a link with some instructions! Rochester High School already had a Wikispedia space that had most of the basic info. I tried to update the assisstant principal names but for some reason they would never appear when I saved the changes. Finally I just changed a little bit of info under the trivia. If you go to the site and scroll down to trivia you will see some info about a girl by the name of Megan Goethals who was just announced as the National Gatorade Cross Country runner of the year for winning nationals. I added that little bit of info.

A quick note about the wikis, I think these are GREAT tools some colleagues and myself have been talking about setting up a district wiki that could help us all share assignments despite being at different buildings. This will surely help new teachers that are coming in the district and really struggle at the outset because they don't have all of the resources, that won't be the case any longer.