Long time, no post

With my job as tech strategist, there are monts at a time where it is go go go…all day…that has described this last month for me. So, I haven’t been able to post a thing.

I have been spending a lot of time in classrooms with teachers on my campus working on their blogs and am seeing some amazing things.

We have a health class that has been discussing the effects of drug use and Mrs. Torres had her students post a message about a situation where drugs entered their life and how they would handle it. They will be conducting a debate in a few weeks for National Smoke Out Day and will be posting their thoughts.

Mrs. Wooten’s science blog is broken down by period with thought provoking questions based on current units. Her main blog includes class announcements and an absent page to increase parent communication.

Ms. Martino has created a true online community with her algebra blog. She has students respond to problems of the week with their description of how they solved the problem; then commented on how the other processes posted helped them ‘get it’. She is also in the process of training classroom reporters who will creat posts based on concepts covered in class.

Finally, Ms. Allard and I have been working on getting her US History blog up and running. Our staff participated in a training on constructed responses, so she wanted to encorporate her blog into it. She is using her main blog to post assignments, then created a blog for each period as an area for students to post their work. She will have her kids respond to a discussion about the Declaration of Independence, then have the students comment on each others responses.

Just like anything new, the teachers have spent time getting their blogs up and running. However, the increase in the level of engagement of the students is amazing. Mrs. Dain, posted a quiz on her ELA blog earlier in the year, and the kids keep asking her when she is going to give another quiz on her blog!! Imagine that, the kids WANT A QUIZ!! WOW…