#ISTE12: Making connections with blogging: Authentic Learning for today’s classrooms (Lisa Parisi, Brian Crosby)

Notes (from presenters in bold, from me in italics):

• When having your students blog, you MUST talk about internet safety.  You must teach them what they can and cannot say online. 
• Do all the safety early so you don't have to worry about it later. 

I need to plan and collect resources, blogs, articles, etc of what I need to teach my students.  Sometimes I have the habit of wanting to jump right into things without training my students good enough - then I get frustrated later on!  This year, I really want to make sure my students are well-trained and understand the expectations from the beginning so hopefully that will reduce stress and anxiety later on.

• Their students blog both at home and at school

I would like most of the blogging to be done outside of class time (and since I only have 3 computers in my class, it can't really be done all in class!), but I could see taking the class to the computer lab a few times at the beginning as they are being trained. 

• Math blogs
• Solve a problem and explain their solution
• One person starts a problem, next person has to respond to that with a solution... next person continues on, fixes the mistake, etc 

I'm thinking if I did this, it would occur on the class blog at kirchmathanalysis.blogspot.com.  I'm not sure if I'm going to be using the main posting feature of that blog, or just the pages with all my content hosted yet.
I'm also starting a blog  for student work here http://kirchstudentwork.blogspot.com/ My thoughts for that is this is where we will be begin, and then this will branch off to individual student blogs linked here. I was contemplating having pages for each unit and having student playlists embedded one each page, but that is a lot of work on my part when instead, I could just put that in the students' hands and have them be updating their playlists on their blogs and just link it once from the main page.

• Beginning of the year blog
• Students write about their expectations for the year
• Goals and dreams for the year (September; revisit in January and June) 

I generally have students do something like this anyways - how great it would be to have it posted on a blog where they can go back to it at any time! My only thought is that I'm not sure if I am going to have students start their own blogs right away or if we are going to build into it.

• End of Year - have students go back through blogs they have written earlier in the year and look back
• This is a fantastic portfolio of student work

Yes :)

• If/when they look back, don't delete original post.  Do a "Redux: Original Post" and copy paste it over to new post.  Then fix, rewrite, etc and leave link to original post
• Great for our ELs to see how far they have come

This is what makes me want to do this with my Algebra 1's as well. At first, I'm thinking I was just going to do this with my older kids.  However, I think with my Algebra 1's it would be a great place to see growth as well as practice writing.

• One of the most important things about blogging is connecting and commenting!  

I'm not sure how to effectively monitor the student commenting and keeping track of who is commenting and who is not commenting.  Also, if my students all have their own blogs, how can I moderate comments?  Will they need to add me as an editor to each of their blogs?  Will that just become crazy on my part?

 What I want my students blogging about:

• Beginning of the year thoughts and goals
• Mid-Year and End-of-Year goals and evaluations
• Reflections on Units (normally I have them do a handwritten PMI, I could have them do this on the blog instead)
• P = Plusses - what did you do really well on this chapter, what did you understand the most, etc
• M = Minuses - what did you struggle with this chapter, what do you still need more help or practice on, etc.
• I = Interesting - what did you find the most interesting about this chapter?  It can be a specific concept you learned that you really enjoyed, or a learning activity you participated in
• Special Posts - if I find an interesting article, post, video, etc that I want my students to reflect and respond to.
• School-Wide Writing - we do this 4x a year and I could have my students post their essays online instead of turning them in on paper. I would want to provide a way for students to submit it privately as well if it is a prompt that might be somewhat personal.
• Student's Learning Playlists via MentorMob.com - Playlists of student-created content.  Don't know if I want this organized by unit, just put on the class blog, or put on each individual blog... gotta think about that one!
• Student's curated content  via MentorMob.com - playlists of content that students have found.  Again, I'm not sure if I want this to be a "class playlist" where everyone contributes, or if I want each student to have their own playlist that they can add to as they find things to help them. (They can add things to their playlist that they like from other students)
• (Math Analysis only) - Student's WPP's - I would have students create a page for this playlist to be on and they would add to it throughout the year.