I sit here writing this post at 9:30 at night in broad daylight. The days are long and with that the pull to get outdoors becomes stronger as summer approaches. Many students throughout Alaska will have the opportunity to take part in summer learning adventures both in and out of the classroom. In order to keep young minds engaged and to help prevent the dreaded summer learning loss learning opportunities need to become even more captivating. What greater way to enthrall those young scholars than to create and utilize a classroom blog.
Last summer I had the opportunity to help teachers in two different cities in Alaska conduct summer learning opportunities. The students who took part in the southern summer school learned how to find local edible plants and create medicinal salves and those in the northern summer program learned about different art styles and mediums. Both schools also focused on strengthening their students' core academic abilities. Looking back these opportunities would have been enhanced had the classes utilized a blog where students could have shared with the world their adventures.
The summer learning programs lasted between three and four weeks and had students in a wide range of grades, kindergarten through middle school. All of the students participated in journaling activities to some extent or another every week and in come cases every day. Taking those paper and pencil activities and extending them into the read/write web could bring a whole new dimension and ownership into the activity. Perhaps setting up a kidblog.org classroom blogging community so that all students are interconnected and can therefor learn from each other would strengthen the summer school experience.
Have you ever tried a using a blog with a diverse age group of students or students in a summer program? I would love to hear suggestions, comments and success stories.
Ms. Kat
What an interesting and simple idea. I have used blogs in my past classrooms and told the students that at the end of the school year I would leave the blog open so that they could keep in touch during the summer. For the first few weeks the students started posting but after that the post became less and less until they stopped all together. Giving the students a purpose for the blog during the summer is a great idea. Students can share their learning and still keep in touch with each other. I really think I'm going to use this idea for this summer break.
ReplyDeleteI forgot to include any difficulties that you might face and how you might prevent them in my previous post. I think that the difficulty that you might face is that students may not feel that they have to post to the blog because they may not be held accountable for posting since it is the summer. I am not sure if you have systems in place for this, but one way is to provide some sort of certificate or reward for continuing with the posts during the summer. Maybe an announcement during the beginning of the year and a certificate of completion or even a small end of course celebration might provide the motivation to keep the posting going over the summer.
ReplyDeleteMrs. Gasser,
DeleteI was envisioning the students working on their blogs during summer school instead of a paper journal. I think it would be great if the students were able to work on their blogs all summer but it would be a challenge for students who do not have easy access to computers and the internet.
Thank you for your comments,
Kat
Ms. Katt
ReplyDeleteI have not had the opportunity to blog with students at different grade levels in a summer adventure program, however I think if you set up different blogs per grade level but using the same skill will be beneficial to keep track of who is participating. Do a lot of the students participate in the blogging process when school is over? Is this something that the school it's self sets up as a summer school program or is this learning adventure the teacher's choice. Great concept dividing the experiences with the Northern and Southern students.
Sciencerocks,
DeleteSetting students up in similar grade level groups would be a great idea. As far as I know the students do not participate in a blog right now. In order for the blogging experiment to be successful I would need the teachers in the field to be comfortable with the process to trouble shoot any problems that came up.
Thank you for your questions,
Kat
Ms. Kat,
ReplyDeleteIncorporating a blog into the summer program and allowing it to be used as a resource for the students to post what they learned is a great tool to keep the lessons interactive and engaging for the students. The students could also post pictures of what they found and did as well as video clips. Using kidblog is a great resource because you can password protect it to make sure that only those individuals who have access could view and contribute to the blog.
With the internet being such a vast resource of information and way to share what one has learned it can be even more important to make that the students work is protected or monitored. Which with the proper blog or use of the blog this can be done.
The program sounds interesting and a great hands on learning lesson.