Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Blogs in my classroom

I am a 7th grade math teacher and while I find blogs fascinating and see their potential for getting students to collaborate I have had a hard time developing ways to to use them in my classroom.  As a math teacher I find that giving my students individual feed back on assignments is one of the best ways for me to correct them and help them to see what mistake they are making and how to correct them.  This however, can be extremely time consuming as one class's assignment can take me up to an hour and a half to grade.  I am beginning to think that blogging might be a way for me to help give student more constructive feed back on their homework and assignments they are correcting.  My initial thought is to set up a blog where students can go and post their questions about assignments.  I would try to check it in the evenings so students could get feed back rapidly but  I know that this might get to be a little over whelming on my part though and I might not always be able to answer questions each night.  To counter act this I would focus on the evenings before assignments were due when all my little procrastinators are stressing out.  My goal would be that students might even start to help each other out by responding to one another rather than waiting for me.  My major concerns are would my students use this if it was not required and how would I encourage them to help each other out with out blatantly giving each other answers.  What do you all think?

2 comments:

  1. I teach Math and Science to 5th and 6th graders, and I found it so much easier to develop blogging ideas for Science. I am also concerned about my students just posting their answers without explanation to "help" their classmates. I was thinking about having a student each day, who was pretty confident with the material, post a summary of the math lesson and an example. Then that student could be the "expert" for the day and earn extra credit in Math. It would be great to have other students chime in as well. Any valuable contribution could be worth extra credit points too. Just a thought...

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  2. I think that is a great idea. Students could then be asked to comment on the summary and add anything they think is missing or even correct any mistakes they find.

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