I found the Michigan Merit Curriculum Online Experience Guideline Companion Document very useful. If I were a teaching in a classroom, I would definitely use EduBlogs http://edublogs.com – a personal online journal- as one of the technologies as an online experience.
What content could this help you teach?
Teachers could teach a foreign language with EduBlogs. Blogging promotes writing skills and builds language proficiency. Students could blog on various topics, they could blog a summary of a book chapter, etc. Blogging also provides a resource for sharing. Student would blog and other classmates would follow his/her blog and comment. Idea for an activity: teacher can give a student 10 new words and they would have to blog using those 10 new words. A classmate would have to comment on the blog using 5 out of 10 new foreign words. Blogging builds student's vocabulary, grammar and imagination!
This activity would also meet Michigan World Language Standards (Communicate in Languages Other Than English) 1- 1.1 Communication Interpersonal Communication: Students engage in conversations, provide and obtain information, express feelings and emotions, and exchange opinions.
What type of pedagogical strategies might you use with your students?
Some of the pedagogical strategies that I might use are: summarizing, feedback and homework.
I did not find any technologies which would be harder to use with students.
What I like about blogs: students with various learning styles could participate in this activity. Even a shy student who does not like to speak up in the classroom would feel more comfortable writing down ideas and thoughts.
Thanks for sharing this Neringa. The research is showing that students using blogs are indeed improving their writing skills and writing more. It does seem valuable for many youngsters. ~Carolyn
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