Blogging

The world of blogging in my classroom has begun! We finally got the problems ironed out and the children posted their first blog post about the field trip to Old Salem. As I have talked about before, I often struggle with making sure technology doesn't interfere with the traditional teaching of the classroom. I made the children write a rough draft, get it edited, and then they were allowed to publish it to a blog. I feel this is a good compromise. They still had to go through the process of writing. I think I will make this a common practice. So my next question is about 4th graders typing their first drafts. Do you feel they should still be handwriting their work or is it okay to allow them to type their work? Some children prefer to type (as I do), but it is too early? Should they still be practicing their cursive? They do write in other areas such as spelling, homework, and math. Not sure what the answer is. I would be curious of your thoughts. We plan to post a couple more blogs in the coming weeks and then I'll send out a plea for comments. That will motivate the children!

Feeling the Stress of the School Year

My school year in in full force and I realized that I have posted on my blog in a few weeks. That is sad to me. I told myself I would try to keep this going weekly, but life has a way of slipping by you, especially when you are teaching! My class has molded itself into a great group. They are kind, funny, and excited about learning! They love technology and get excited when I give them options to use technology in their learning. We have gathered quite a group of followers and followees on Twitter. We are following 35 or more classrooms. We are playing geography games with a couple, which the children are enjoying! I have used Twitter to help us learn latitude and longitude in our lessons, by plotting our followers on Google Earth. It's all about keeping things authentic!

I have our iPad floating through the classroom each day to allow each child to post tweets. Each day the child changes and the child is our "researcher and tweeter" for the day. This works better than remembering to tweet as a class at the end of the day!

We are diving into the world of blogging. Of course, our blog is having some technical difficulties currently, so we are working with our tech guys to sort things out. I'm hopeful this will be a great place for publishing in the future! I'll blog more about that soon! More to come...