Teach42

Wow I wish I could share this with you. Because of the red tape involved with putting the students ‘out there’ on the web, we’ve decided to get the whole blog thing going in a smaller, more secure package. We have a seventh grade class and an eighth grade class who each have their own communal blog which is currently private and only accessible by the students and teachers. The two classes are going about thing in different ways. The eighth grade class is essentially using it as a message board. Students are allowed to create threads and respond to threads. It’s going alright, but I wouldn’t say that it’s a stellar example of how we want it to work in an elementary classroom yet. However, it’s very early on in the process and we’re still figuring out what works and what doesn’t. WAY too early to pass judgement in any way shape or form. However, the seventh grade blog has a very interesting dynamic to it.

The teacher (name’s being kept anonymous to protect the innocent) posts things like ” Discuss your reaction to Arthur C. Clarke’s short story, The Sentinel. Do you believe that there is life outside of Earth?” and then students can comment on it. The first few times, students were required to respond on the blog. Recently, and in the case of the question above, the teacher just mentioned that she’d posted something on the blog and the students could respond if they wanted to. The respond has been impressive to say the least. The conversation started a little slowly, with comments like, “It was really confusing!” and “It was a fun story and interesting to see how he knew sooooooooooo much about space and the gravity thing.” However, as the students started reading each others comments and responding to them, the conversation went off in entirely new directions. A small sampling of the comments students made:

I also that the Aurther C. Clark was an extremely talented writter. He made the story sound so alive and real. He almost made me believe that there was something like that pryamid on the moon.

Well to add to [a student’s] comment i think that he really did set a picture in our minds. This was one of those story’s that made you think beyond the writing. after we finished reading in class, the first thing i thought to myself was what if that is true. I almost convinced myself that there is life out of earth. HE IS AN AWESOME WRITTER!!!

but i do think there might be like plants and what not. The story was sort of confusing, but once it was explained it was actually pretty interesting. I thought that when the explorer was doing is exploring stuff he was not really thinking. With the alien thingy, i dong really agree with that. If there really was a thing on the moon, i doubt it would have been putten there by aliens and that the aliens would come to earth and maybe be proud or really mad at the us. Overall, i liked the story we read b4 a lot better!

To answer [the teacher]’s question about if there is life outside of earth, i think there is. People usually answer this question thinking only of our solar system. But there are millions more. For all we know There could be a whole other universe. I strongly belive that there is another planet that has life forms on it.

These students had a literature discussion 100% voluntarily. They chose to continue from home that evening. How many times do you think that normally happens? That students take a story that they read for class and voluntarily discuss it after school hours? And this is all without one of the greatest incentives blogs have to offer: the ability to be published, and be seen by the rest of the world. These are private sites. The only thing they can do is discuss things with each other.

I wish I could include links in this post to the individual comments, or to the site in general. Unfortunately, we just aren’t there yet. I’m working on it though. One step at a time.

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