PLNS (Tool #2)

I think personal learning communities are great, for both teachers and students. It's an easy way to feel connected to other people and share ideas. In the past, I have found a few teachers' blogs on my own and gotten a lot of great ideas this way! I can't wait to explore this idea with my students.

I read the advice on how to increase comments. I liked that the writer pointed out that in order to receive comments, the blog needs to be worthy of them. I think this will help motivate my students in their writing. I know that I am putting a lot more thought into what I write on this blog simply because I know others are going to read it!

I think these suggestions would be a good starting place to model how to invite commenting, and make appropriate comments in return. Students typically have a hard time critiquing the work of their classmates, so this will be an important lesson. I think that over time this will come naturally to my students, but in the beginning it will be very important to set guidelines.

I am off to comment on some other blogs!

Getting Started!

I am so glad to finally get started with 11 Tools. I wanted to wait until after summer school was out to get started, and so here I am finally! It wasn't that difficult to get my blog started, and I actually had fun making my Avatar. Hopefully later on I can get a little more creative with my layout, etc.

I would love to use Tool #1 in my classroom. My second graders love it when I use Morning Messages; they get excited about reading when it is a personal message with meaning to them. They also enjoy communicating through dialogue journals. I think blogging would be a way to take that to a whole new level while emersing them in technology!