One of the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) student standards focuses on communication and collaboration; that students must communicate, interact, and publish with peers and experts using a variety of digital tools.
What do you have students doing in your classroom to meet this standard? One suggestion could be to have students write posts to a classroom blog.
Often times teachers are so busy during a jam packed day, they don’t have time to sit and write a blog post of classroom happenings. Thus, it becomes another after school extra added onto the full plate taken home each evening.
Solution is simple, let the students be blog authors.
You can share rights with student accounts so they can become blog authors, but with this method you will need to change these rights each year.
An easier method to consider would be to have students email their blog posts into the blog. As a student composes an email, the subject of the email is the title of the post, and the content of the message is the post itself. Images can be included in the post.
Blogger settings have email options, providing you with the email address in which to send the post. Many teachers prefer to have the option set on draft mode so they can preview the post before publishing.
By doing this students simply email in their post, the teacher proof reads the content, then publishes when ready.
Have a designated blog author for the week. Choose at random a few authors each week. Have students write blog posts at least once every two weeks as a task they need to complete.
Students will be motivated authors regardless of how you implement. And you will be sharing stories of classroom happenings beyond the Friday folders that are sent home.
