•How effective were your actions in helping you meet your goals?
•What have you learned so far that you can apply in your instructional practice?
•What do you still have to learn? What new questions have arisen?
•How will you adjust your plan to fit your current needs?
1. To help me reach my goal of modeling digital citizenship, I have been citing any and all resources I use in my lessons and unit plans. I even cite images and point out to students that I have done so. When I give out assignments, I'm sure to make it very clear that my students should also be following suit by doing the same --citing all sources AND images. I have learned that I need to really force students to take the extra time to give credit where it's due and explain that it may take time and effort but it's very important. For now, everything seems to be going as planned and modeling digital citizenship is easier than I had initially thought it would be.
2. For blogging, I have learned that a lot of parents are really interested in the blog at first, but not much communication is going on the blog. However, even if they aren't contributing to the blog comments, they are getting a good amount of important information just from reading the blog. So, I have to find a good way to get parents excited and motivated to use the blogging comments. For now, I will continue to post on the blog, so parents can read about the progress in our classroom, and in the future, I will speak about the blog at back to school night to get them excited about using it.
Bethanne,
ReplyDeleteDigital citizenship can be difficult to model but it sounds like you are doing a fine job of demonstrating the importance of citing sources. Since your students are in middle school, I think they can handle citing ALL sources and images. Keep up the good work!
Bethanne,
ReplyDeleteI really like the idea of having your parents contribute to the class blog. You might want to ask questions about different activities their children have completed or even start a contribution section for parents to share ideas about how they could become involved in the daily lessons. Sometimes they are just as fearful as teachers to put themselves out there for ridicule. Once they start you will see that it will become easier for them. Good luck, sounds like something many of us may want to start. Great parent involvement!!!!
Bethanne,
ReplyDeleteSounds like you are doing a great job making your students aware of how important it is to cite sources. I wish I were as thorough as you are. Your students should appreciate your hard work!
I have never really thought about how many sources I am using until I looked at a few of my Power Points on Egyptian pyramids. It is full of pictures and I gave no credit to the authors. I see how important this is as do you. Keep up the good work!
Bethanne,
ReplyDeleteGreat job on the citing of sources, that is one time consuming part that we all need to work on.
As for getting parents interested in the blog, maybe hold an annual comment competition. There are plugins that you can use on your blog depending on what host you use. There are many out there, but I know if you use Wordpress, you can use one called: http://intensedebate.com/ You can get ranked based off of how much you post AND you can even comment with your Tiwtter or Facebook account. Best of all, it's free.
As I looked around on the site, Intense Debate claims to work with any blogging program.
ReplyDelete