Reflection 2.0

While working with my 6th grade students in keyboarding class, I’ve been struggling with how to introduce the how-to lessons for blogs and wikis. The students already know the mechanics of commenting on a blog, but we have a lot of work to do on writing posts and making sure work is fit for public consumption. I want to introduce the concept of blogs and wikis in my keyboarding class as a way to practice the keyboarding skills while learning new technologies, but also as part of a useful project rather than simply a how-to lesson.

The main issue I have is time - I have each group for 10 days, 1 hour each day. This led me to decide to create a project that can be built upon by each class, rather than starting over every 10 days. The students will build up to writing posts on Global Bloggers (an existing blog project) through brainstorming on our classroom blog, Keying In, and posting research on our new research wiki, 6th Grade Research. The researching and writing of posts will be done in groups of 2 or 3. I decided on group work because it’s been my experience in a lab setting that with a classes of almost 30 students, groups usually lead to more work actually getting done because students are able to help one another through the technical issues and questions about directions.

I will have the students work on the posts in Word before copying into Global Bloggers. As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts about blogging with my students, I think drafting the posts in a word processor allows greater flexibility. Also, due to the nature of Global Bloggers (a teacher-run elementary blog with student commentors), I am going to be having the 6th graders write their posts under my account (after I’ve logged in) rather than actually giving them access. Again, this is because of the short time I have with the students and the nature of the Global Bloggers blog. I have set up student blogs in the past and will post about that at another time.

At this point, the students have done the brainstorming of ideas by commenting on a post on Keying In and I have demonstrated to all of the groups how to log on to the wiki and add a link. Note: I set up 10 student accounts for the wiki that will be able to transfer to the next class when they start. I demonstrated to each group rather than the whole class because I don’t have access to a projector in my classroom. The rest of the class was working on keyboarding while I did the demonstrations.

While we are working on blogs and wikis, we are also spending part of the class reviewing keyboarding skills in DanceMat Typing and learning/reviewing some basic computer skills. We just finished going over Mac keyboard shortcuts - you can see the google docs version of my handout here: Mac keyboard shortcuts. We have also been reviewing how to right-click (CTRL-click on Mac) to open links in new tabs or windows to make web navigation easier.

Our next step in the project will be reviewing internet search strategies and compiling our research on the wiki. I hope to do this at the beginning of next week and get at least one post written for Global Bloggers before this group moves on. This project has been an eye-opener so far - I’ve learned that it’s way easier to actually blog and create/use wikis myself than to teach 30 middle school students how to do so! The logistics with logins and demonstrations on that scale were a bit more than I anticipated, but I think we’re getting to the fun part now