My students’ are still wrestling with their digital footprint – at the moment this is a “Making Good Decisions” pull out program exercise and is not widely practiced in our classrooms as a team on a day-to -day basis. I have to remind my students’ often of the dangers of hitting the return button without fully thinking though what they are posting. This is a very good habit to form – and our Acceptable Use Policy is rather explicit to this point (although I rather doubt that by this juncture in the year, the students’ remember signing that innocuous little form in the first days of school in August!) As Richardson states, “Giving each student a Weblog basically means a paperless classroom” (Richardson, 2010, pg 46) – and in that environment the paper trail is a little more challenging, especially when students don’t quite live up to their digital profile. I like the idea of YAPPY from Linda Yollis, Las Virgines USD, CA in her short movie about blogging – never post your name, address, phone, password or your plans online. My 8th Grade will certainly relate to and like that message!
As this is a Geography class, the students were keen to see the perspectives of other bloggers about events or topics that they were learning about all over the world and some of the blogs (and I confess, classroom use has been ad-hoc to this point!) reflect some good ideas – but there is little in the way of good conversation or adding to the information – yet!
On Friday they completed “TED” talks about a contemporary forced migration that they were assigned to investigate and create a two-minute talk that they would post on their portfolios. This week (how very timely for testing out this rubric below!) the students will watch each other’s talks; leave feedback on each student’s blog. By the end of the week, students from their learning will create a short essay responding to the prompt “To what extent is migration a fundamental human right?” As I talked with one student about the next steps using the blog, she showed me when we last formally used the blog – in early December. Clearly the natural blogging intuition has not been instilled in this class yet – relating to what Hillary Miller said in her article “Lessons from a First-Time Course Blogger”, where she states “It’s easy to lose track of the blog, and its implementation should be planned with an eye towards avoiding this.” This student’s blog was hidden away on her “About me” page and therefore did not manifest in her daily thoughts on the subjects that we were learning about.
This will be a summative assessment – graded using the Middle Years Programme (MYP) Assessment Criteria. However, it did not occur to me that formative assessment of blogs in a build up to this piece of writing might give excellent evidence as to how they got to that point in learning. Therefore, the rubric below is based on the following Criteria for Assessment, which is extracted from the subject guide for MYP – Individuals and Societies (Geography). I’m excited that the stars aligned for this to happen this week. I love it when my learning collides so deliciously with the students’!
References:
Ricahrdson, W. (2010) Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin