An Online Experience

I really, really love the idea of incorporating the use of blogs and wikis in my classroom. Because of the nature of an English class, these tools can be used to help teach and demonstrate learning in any of the major units that I teach. As my mind races, I particularly see me using them in my Romeo and Juliet and my To Kill a Mockingbird units.

The amount of writing students do in our school is embarrassingly sparse. We do an amazing job at teaching and guiding literature, but the kids simply do not write enough. Blogs is another way that students can discuss what we have read, inferred, and learned, while practicing writing. Skeptics are quick to say that students are also lacking in the amount of time that they are reading, but I think that kids read more now than ever before. It's just a questions as to what they are reading. Between blogs, social networks pages, texts, e-mails, and even the old fashioned, hand-written note, kids are reading all of the time. Instead of fighting this, we can promote better reading by speaking their language

Blogs can be used as a method of journaling. Instead of the kids responding to a prompt in a notebook, they could post it to their blog, thus sharing their thoughts with everyone in the class. Wikis could also work in the same fashion, giving them a place to collaborate with each other.

For this to work, there would first have to be some deductive teaching, in order to get all of the kids on the same page. For students to be able to blog, they first must be taught how. Then, once we dive into whatever curriculum, constructivism can come into play, as they make new discoveries with each other, with me serving more as a facilitator.

I think that podCasts would be a little bit more difficult to incorporate, only because they are a little more complex and would take more time to learn how to do these effectively. I also want to steer clear away from any technology that begins to shift the course from featuring online experiences to becoming an online class. I think there is a tremendous amount of value in face to face learning, and one of the reasons I like blogs so much is that it compliments what we do in the classroom rather than replace it. As I look at our credit recovery program, students that refused to (or couldn't) work in a traditional classroom, are being shuffled through online programs that do not do the subject material any justice. While these students are earning credits, they are not learning. Technology has a place in a classroom and can be a wonderful asset, but not at the expense of killing learning.