Blogging provides many educational opportunities:
- Students have an authentic audience for their writing and that has an impact on the quality of their posts.
- Students revisit and reflect upon the lessons when they read the posts on the blog. The learning doesn't stop when the chapter or unit ends, commenting keeps the learning alive.
- Students learn how to navigate around the Internet and how to present digital information in a variety of ways.
- Students have opportunities to participate and contribute to an online community. Teaching this skill to students in elementary school helps prepare students for more individualize online collaboration in the middle and high school years.
How To Website from The Edublogger Math Blogging ideas from Wendy Pettit News Response Sheet To blog or not to blog... great article by Brenda Dyck Sample class website: Denton Dynamos' Discussions Rocketeers Wendy Petti is the creator of the award-winning Math Cats Web site. She teaches 4th grade math at Washington International School, as well as presenting across the nation. I discovered a couple of her articles on Edutopia. One is on Writing About Math, which attracted me because in doing blogging with students for the first time last school year, I was and am always on the lookout for good prompts, questioning ideas and resources (I am learning to ask more open-ended questions, but still have miles to go). After reading the article, I ordered a couple of books from Amazon, that looked good. One thing that is happening in the creation of my own web page/blog site (whatever we are going to call this!), is that I am starting to imagine the Math Notebooks that students kept last year in addition to participating in a weekly blog question, might be better to create and develop into a more electronic format, and ownership of each student's own website or blogsite. So, these questions look good. The second article is on Math in the News, and offers oodles more ideas for topics, curriculum enhancement and relationship to economics and real world charts, graphs, usage of numbers and just the universality of mathematics. A summary of Wendi Pettit's articles may be viewed here. |