Comments on: Students blog away…. http://blog.brettmoller.com/2005/10/16/students-blog-away/ Thoughts on education and educational technology. Fri, 04 Jun 2010 12:06:17 -0700 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 hourly 1 By: Mike Hetherington http://blog.brettmoller.com/2005/10/16/students-blog-away/comment-page-1/#comment-29 Mike Hetherington Tue, 25 Oct 2005 01:24:42 +0000 http://blog.brettmoller.com/?p=52#comment-29 Brett, Your student blog is really coming along. It looks like the key is to give the students open ended questions related to the curriculum. This allows them to express their opinions openly while keeping the discussion ( and learning) focused on the teachers intended topic area. Keep the students commenting on each others blogs. Keeps the poster honest about the quality of their writing if they know they have a critcal audience. Of course, critical is the key. If the commentators do not add to the conversation, but only reflect with "great job" or "I like it" the additional learning is minimal from the comment end. I just added a comment on YamZ"s post. Can't hurt when an other teacher comments. I recently told my students, who were posting on Plate Tectonics, that it was not out of the question that a professional geologist might comment on their writing. They thought that was cool and realized that it could happen. By the way, if your students or you would like to comment on any of our blog entries, feel free to do so. I'm running a group blog for my 6th graders and they are giving me more material to post by the day. We also finally got out podcast up and running, and have been using a wiki to collaborate on the scripts. Take a listen and see what you think. The blog and podcast is at http://room613talk05.edublogs.org and the podcast is also listed under the same name on itunes. Keep up the good work! Mike Hetherington Connecticut, USA Brett,
Your student blog is really coming along. It looks like the key is to give the students open ended questions related to the curriculum. This allows them to express their opinions openly while keeping the discussion ( and learning) focused on the teachers intended topic area. Keep the students commenting on each others blogs. Keeps the poster honest about the quality of their writing if they know they have a critcal audience. Of course, critical is the key. If the commentators do not add to the conversation, but only reflect with “great job” or “I like it” the additional learning is minimal from the comment end.
I just added a comment on YamZ”s post. Can’t hurt when an other teacher comments. I recently told my students, who were posting on Plate Tectonics, that it was not out of the question that a professional geologist might comment on their writing. They thought that was cool and realized that it could happen.

By the way, if your students or you would like to comment on any of our blog entries, feel free to do so. I’m running a group blog for my 6th graders and they are giving me more material to post by the day. We also finally got out podcast up and running, and have been using a wiki to collaborate on the scripts. Take a listen and see what you think. The blog and podcast is at http://room613talk05.edublogs.org and the podcast is also listed under the same name on itunes.

Keep up the good work!
Mike Hetherington
Connecticut, USA

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