Turn Them Loose and Let Them Blog

Blogging continues to be one of my (Jamie's) favorite ways to integrate technology into my English classroom.   This year I am exploring using blogs to provide my students with the opportunity to write about a topic of personal interest.  There is much research out there to support allowing students to choose freely.  In the words of Lucy Calkins, “Choice matters. Not a little, but a lot.”  

What do you like to do in your free time?
 What type of books do you like to read?
What kind of foods do you like to eat?

To kick off blogging this year, we did a lot of brainstorming about personal interests.  I started with a simple stick figure.  Students were asked questions, and then they were given a few minutes to respond with corresponding thoughts/ideas on their stick man/woman.

The center represents things we love the most.

A few days later, we drew a heart map in our journals to provide us with a space to write all the things we are passionate about.  This activity is taken from Nancy Atwell’s Lesson that Change Writers.

When I felt my students had cultivated enough ideas, we began discussing blogs.  In our book Literacy Lessons for a Digital World, Meg and I suggest having your students view the Common Craft video on blogging to introduce any blogging lesson.  The video provides a clear explanation of what a blog is and how it is used.  Before blogging, I also shared mentor text.  My mentor text was of course a blog.  I showed them our JMLiteracy blog. We discussed my interest in ed-tech, and why I would choose that topic to blog about with Mrs. Knapik.  Modeling for your students is a key component to good teaching.  By showing my students that I am a blogger, I am showing kids that I practice what I “preach”. 

My students were then assigned the task of drafting their first blog post.  Their goal was to write an introductory post about themselves and their blog topic.  We took our blog post through the writing process, and then we published to our classroom blog.   The kids were really excited because they knew their audience was beyond the scope of just the teacher’s eyes.

Wait!  It gets even more exciting.  After posting, I took blogging one step further.  I collaborated with another English teacher in my building to provide an audience for my students’ blogs.  Mrs. Horrigan’s sixth graders read my seventh graders’ blog posts and left comments on their blogs.  When my students saw that comments were left on their blogs by other students, the bar was further raised.  My students immediately began comparing who got more comments, and I used this as a teachable moment.  Why did some posts get read more than others?  We went through the blogging checklist (scroll to bottom of this link to download checklist), and we discussed the characteristics of the blogs with the most traffic.

Take a look at a few of my students introductory blog posts and feel free to leave a comment.

Fashion Blog
DIY Blog
Reading Blog
Free Time Blog
Nature Blog

QR Codes Transform Our Math Classroom

If you have read our blog before, you will remember when Jamie wrote her exciting post on engaging with QR codes at the Henry Ford Museum.  This year I (Meg) am teaching sixth grade math again, and we are piloting one-to-one iPads.  Having a brand new device in my classroom was both exciting and challenging at the beginning of the school year.  Some of my favorite web-based activities were difficult to do on the iPad.  For example, I could no longer have my students create a visual math glossary using tables in Google Docs like they did in the past because the Google Doc iPad app does not allow users to create tables or insert images.  Instead, I needed to look through a new lens when I was designing tech-related activities since the capabilities of the iPad are vastly different than those of a netbook, our previous one-to-one device.

Math Super Stars QR Code Bulletin Board

One unique capability an iPad offers is the ability to scan QR, or "Quick Response", codes.  I definitely wanted to harness the potential of this tool in some way in my math classroom.  One of the most common uses for QR codes in the classroom is to use them in conjunction with book trailers.  Students (or teachers) create book trailers, and then a QR code is created and taped onto a book so that when it is scanned the person can view a book trailer for that particular book.  As a math teacher, this idea wouldn't work for my every day use.  However I loved the idea of using QR codes to connect to student-created work.  I also found that my "Math Super Stars" wall was still empty after the first month of school since the students were doing less work on paper than they used to.  My idea started to form...

Close Up View of QR Codes on My
Math Super Stars Bulletin Board

My students had some experience using the  Educreations iPad app to make math video tutorials to explain their thinking.  Sometimes they would do this in relation to correcting an error made on a formative assessment, and other times I would specifically assign they use the app to explain their strategy for solving a real-world problem related to our learning objectives.  Once I figured out that each Educreations video had a unique hyperlink, I know my QR code dreams could become a reality.  I launched my Math Super Stars bulletin board with a brand new purpose: students whose videos not only showed correct problem solving but also included clear explanations rich with math vocabulary would be featured on the Math Super Stars board.  In the past month, this board has become a way to showcase and honor exemplary problem solving, and it is also a useful resource for students that is always accessible in my classroom.  Before summative assessments, I now have students who choose to spend time during advisory scanning these QR codes as a means of clarifying their understanding in review for the summative assessment.  I know I have just scratched the surface of the potential QR codes have in my classroom, but I would say my first experiment has been a success!

Have any of you used QR codes with success in your classrooms?  We would love to hear your ideas, too!