Where did the time go?

Wow. I have been so busy blogging with my classes that I totally lost track of coming on here to update everyone! Things have been going great. The students quickly grasped how the site works for posting, commenting, editing posts, etc. After talking about what a quality post looked like and comparing it to the same writing rubric that we used during the writing portion of the project the classes had a much clearer picture of what was expected. Also, it really improved their writing.

We went onto learning how to post a picture and talked about what kinds of pictures should be posted. We focused on using pictures that supported your point of view or that strenghthened your argument. They really enjoyed being able to post pictures.

The debate about global warming continued to grow over the last two weeks. We looked at evidence from both sides of the argument. We talked about why you should look at many sources of data, not just one. I was really pleased to see that they were becoming much more critical in their thinking. They were searching for sources that supported their side of the argument, i.e. skeptic or believer. They posted graphs and links that showed data that was related.

The interest level continued to be really high. Every day that we spent blogging the classes were excited about it. They wanted to continue. When I told them last week that we would have to draw this project to an end soon they were incredibly disappointed. That is what prompted the discussion and posts about why we should continue blogging. This also gave me the idea to think about how we could continue to use the blogs in the regular classroom, outside the topic of global warming. I encouraged them to think about ideas too!