Thing 13: The 21st Century in my PJs!!
Wow! I chose to attend the presentation of …….
“We Like Our Blogging Buddies: The Write Stuff with Blogging Mentors”. by Kathy Cassidy and Patrick Lewis on…..
http://k12onlineconference.org/
It was really amazing. We should absolutely be doing this in the lower grades to help with confidence and technology literacy! Go watch this if you have the time.
1st Grade students in Kathy Cassidy’s class were matched up with pre-teaching students in Patrick Lewis’ class. The children would blog and the older students would read and critique in a manner that would encourage and support the 1st graders to try new things and take risks in their writing.
The benefits of this pairing was that the younger children became much better writers and learned about punctuation, capitalization and spaces. They learned to spell at a rapid pace. Kathy Cassidy said this worked so well because they had an audience. They really tried hard to remember all that things the blogging buddy had pointed out to correct.
The benefits for the older students pointed out by Patrick Lewis was that the pre-teaching students learned to make comments that were positive but did point out the spelling errors, capitalization errors and spacing problems. They had to learn to do this as part of their grade.
They did this for 4 months and at the end had a party where the buddies finally met up!
After reading this I will surely mention this to my teachers as a way we can improve our students writing and help them to become computer literate as well!
I hope all is well with everyone.
July 7, 2010 @ 1:10 PM
Hey Kandy!
I agree with you 100%–this use of technology sounds great to me. It is the same with high schoolers: students need an audience to do their best writing. If they are only writing for the teacher, they tend to disengage some and write drab, uninteresting stuff just to fulfill the assignment. When they are writing for peers, though, they are more motivated to do a better job. I hope I can add this to my list of “Things to do better” next year. Hope summer is going great for you.
July 9, 2010 @ 4:15 PM
Kandy- I think this is a great idea! I have been wanting to do an activity with another grade level. This sounds like it would be a great way to combine the technology of blogging with the basics of grammar rules. I’m sure the kids would love interacting with another grade level too. We will have to remember this when school starts. Hope you’re doing well!