Reflections from my blogging course

Initial Thoughts:

I have played around with blogging several years ago in my personal life, mainly to get photos of my kids out to family and friends who don't live close to us who were resistant to Facebook.  Professionally, I haven't used it because I have a Google site that I use for class or my school used one of the plethora of web based classrooms (Edmodo, Gaggle, etc...).   I have used KidBlog for students to use as a daily writing journal, but I didn't actively publish posts.

Changed Thoughts and Changing Uses:

This course has reminded me of the practical place that having a blog resides in the social media / web based  spectrum.  Twitter and Remind are great for short blurbs and reminders and my website is tough to update from my mobile, so my blog could fit neatly in that gap.  

My main plan for future usage is to become an active contributor in the PLN community.  I have a decent PLN through Twitter but at this point I am lurking.  I do have a good Twitter presence with a number of good followers, so I really just need to capitalize on what currently exists there.  I can see my initial impact being here locally at Castleberry ISD in applying technology in the classroom, I am an early adopter and I regularly swing (and miss) with technology  in my lessons and projects.  I feel that I can contribute by blogging the process of applying that technology and providing a forum to discuss the ways to make it a better lesson. 

Limitations:

The main limitation that I see is specific to my community (and others like it), my kid's parents just aren't involved in technology or social media.  Our students are all over social media but their parent's don't engage in social media with the school or teachers.  From what I have seen, our parents use Facebook to communicate with family and that is about it.  It would be interesting to see if they would respond positively to a "Intro to Twitter" course on during registration or during Parent's University.  We could also work that into a video / web course (available in English and Spanish) so that they could view that when convenient. 

Technology Lesson Review

The Assignment

My lesson was meant to help introduce the students to the vocabulary in our new chapter, I had the students create a picture dictionary for vocab words.  The students were given the assigned words, directed to create a shared Google Slides presentation, and then turned loose to create a picture dictionary for the chapter.  I graded it on completion of all the words and appropriate, creative pictures.

Examples

Reflection

The students really enjoyed creating the picture dictionary, in hind sight I would push it to a blended learning opportunity by having the students post their dictionaries to a blog and let them comment on each others posts.  We could even build one super dictionary per class by having them vote on their favorite slides.

Like this assignment, steal away... I'm pretty sure I stole it 

Do you have any ideas on how I can modify this assignment?  Comment below