Week 8

The majority of the work that I do with my class I make sure that I am using my district issued computer that is broadcasting on a district provided server.  I feel safer using the district's spyware rather than having to pay for my own, or rely on possibly a cheaper issue I had purchased.  Although, if you read my discussion post you will see that there are still flaws to a district spyware program.


I like to do a lot of journal writings while we are in class, rather than as homework, so the students can seek guidance since they are not formal papers.  However, I love the idea of blogging so that I can grade each submission as it is posted, rather than having to wait until all 25 papers are turned in.  Even if I could work on a few at a time it might free up some of my time rather than having to spend several hours looking at all of the works.  It would also be great to be able to provide feedback to the student, and the student could review that feedback at any time.  Many times, when students receive a graded paper back, they discard it and it is never to be looked at again.  If all of the papers were collected on one website and they could easily flip through each assignment, the student might be able to observe their own growth.  They could see the work they did at the beginning of the year, and see how they progressed and worked through my suggestions to where they ended the year.


In my classroom right now, the only communication tool I really use is email, and this is mostly with other teachers and parents.  I have a lot of primary elementary students and they are not reliant on email like the rest of us.  We are lucky we can get them to enter their ID to login.  However, blogging is something they would be able to use and would get them entered to the online world.  Before I could expect my students to create/use a blog I would have to create a classroom blog so they could see what one setup would look like.  I would also have to spend some time walking them through the steps of how to create a post and make sure it was accessible to the people it needed to be accessible to.  I would also provide the parents instructions on how to use the blog so they could help their children at home, as well as monitor their child's work.