Collaborative Blogging

Well, thanks to some help from Doug and some prodding from Kelly, my students are now publishing on a blog.  Collaborative Science Blog


I admit I am a total perfectionist and it took me a while to get up and running, but I think that it was well worthwhile. I think their writing needs some work, but this seems to be an excellent way to integrate writing into my content. Kelly came by in the morning class and helped me run the blog and then I ran it for the rest of the day with my 3 other science classes.

A little history on this blog..

I am trying to pattern my blog after Doug's IB blog where the students are applying their content knowledge to current issues, debating each other and engaging in a real dialogue via blogs... I wanted to do something similar to this and came across a video of the real water cycle made by the SurfRider foundation. It explores human impact on the water cycle. The assignment was students were to post a reaction to the video where they describe how humans impact the water cycle negatively and they were to provide a possible solution to the problem.

Now that they have done their part Doug is going to have his high school students follow up on the 6th grade posts and we will see how it goes from there.

One thing I have quickly realized is I need to figure out a way to post responses to each post (blogspot doesn't allow this natively but I can modify the code of the html to make this work) so that I can continue the discussion. I also need to figure out a way to make this process a continuing part of my science instruction.....