Hi everyone. I'm back. As i get through more and more of this class I keep trying to think of ways of integrating this with children in the lower grades. Mainly because I'm in the K-5 program and my focus within this program has been grade three. Then in chapter two they talk about scaffolding in early blogging and a light bulb came on. If, as the teacher, we provide interesting and relevant sites filled with information, which we will have to find a head of time. Then get the kids to view the sites and write a blog about the information. Then the teacher could go through the blogs presenting some blogs to the rest of the class. This is an inside track to "Teachable Moments" so the kids can see how the collaboration works. Because you can physically talk about what someone wrote and then you can start the kids into writing comments directly on the blog. And or talk to the kids about relevant info. and that the info. is not always correct. You could also focus on security aspects that I have talked about in past blogs also. This list is endless...building one step at a time and working onward from there.
The second point I want to talk about at any time in this process you can get a hold of and recruit an audience for the kids to write /read to. Such as professional athletes, musicians, scientists etc. immediately you can see how engaged the children will be if their not talking to their teacher about a specific topic that the teacher may or may not know anything about. Or talking and collaborating with a person in the field. WOW talk about getting kids invested and interested.
Lastly validating information. I know I touched on this even in this blog, but it's an important part of teaching young kids how to use the web. www.internic.com is where you can go to check who registered the domain name on a specific site. Some people may want to remain anonymous but through this site you can find who registered the site and then search out info on the person to determine the validity of the information. www.technorati.com is another useful site to see the validity of the blogger. It shows how many other bloggers have liked to the blog itself. The number used in the text is 100 or more hits and the information should be considered correct. These are all helpful tools especially for little grades. Brian Nenson 3rd yr Ed student
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Hi Brian
Jane and I were doing our project on a wiki site that would contain information that teachers could access for lesson plans, invitation ideas, and just general good stuff. Would you like to join our collaborative project? We are just getting started. This would be for the final project of the class. Give me an email and let me know.
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