I was fortunate enough to attend the Adams-12 Highway 21 Technology Conference last week. One of the great sessions I attended was “Audience and Purpose for All: Writing in a 1:1 Classroom” presented by Chris Moore, a 5th grade teacher in Littleton. Attending this session (almost) made me wish it was not summer time so I could immediately start sharing his ideas with the teachers I support.
From the time Chris started talking, I could feel his enthusiasm for teaching and his passion about the benefits of having students blog. He said a teacher can change a student’s life with these kinds of tools. Students can excel and teach each other, become experts, and build their own learning network. The culture of the classroom shifts when blogging and technology are a common elements in the classroom. Since students have an audience including teachers, classmates, parents, and blog viewers from around the world, they embrace and honor the writing that they post.
They have a class blog (East Dragon Den Classroom Blog) that they use as the main hub, and students link their individual blogs to the class blog. They can also add comments to the class blog. The students know that they can only submit their best work, and other work will be rejected. Chris said some of his best teaching of writing happens as students post. They can talk about if it really is the student’s best work and if not, why.
Although Chris and his students use Blogger, the tool is not the important thing. Providing an audience and purpose for writing is the key.
Resources Shared:
- CoveritLive (email them as educator to get free account for classroom)
- Ninja Words quick dictionary
- KidBlog great for K-2 blogging
- Google Custom Search creates a custom search engine so teachers can select which sites students find in the search
- ClustrMap for tracking geographic location of audience
- Lucy Calkins: Talk about Turning Points w/ kids
- Other great class blogs:
Thanks +ChrisMoore for all the information.
#hwy21
