Blogging with Students - week 1

1. To be honest I've never really thought of using a blog for students. To do so seems to me to be much more of a conversational method of conducting lessons, in a sense. Maybe I just need a better understanding of how a blog could be used in a classroom. To me a blog is a way for someone to be a sort of journalist from their own home or office. Students, on the other hand, aren't exactly playing the journalist role. Instead, I see students more as official "authors." The work that they make are edited to a final version ready to be turned in, or "published," into a well-thought-out paper. This paper could be a research paper or a story, not an ongoing report of something taking place.
Yet perhaps that is why a blog would be used. Rather than make students out to be working on paper after paper at home assignments, they can have an assignment that is done from their house on a continuing basis. A blog could be used to show a student's progress in a science project, or -even better- could be a way for a student to every night reflect on what they had learned at school.
What the blog could be used for would vary depending on whether other students could see each others' blogs as well. If they could see each others' blogs then it would be better suited for them to use them for specific projects or for a class-wide assignment. If not, it would be a terrific way for a teacher to keep in touch with students about the lessons, as a way for the teachers or students to ask questions without the students feeling vulnerable in front of everyone else.
Considering these ideas, I would make sure the first and foremost, students were not to put any information that is private about themselves. This means where they live, their phone numbers, try to avoid listing after-school activities, or personal matters that they wouldn't want others to see. I would also make sure that each student had access to the internet, either at a public place like a library close by (which would also mean a means to access said library), or at home. Then I would make sure that each students is aware of how to use a computer and the internet, if it were OK with their parents. Then I would make sure that each student understood the risks of using the internet and safety precautions to take with it.

2. While using blogs doesn't cover many of the national and state standards for technology, there are several different ones that it does help out with. An example of this is number 3 of the Standards: Research and Information Fluency. A teacher can have students conduct research on a topic and post their research results, as well as their opinion, online on a blog. This would cover the various requirements of using digital tools. Another standard is number 2: Communication and Collaboration. By using a blog students could communicate with one another via digital posts, and stay in contact for an ongoing project, or could use a blog to share an assignment with an audience.

3. For my Google apps lesson plan I chose Historical Novel from Carol LaRow. The lesson objective is to have the entire class read a historical novel about an era in history, and to have the students understand the meaning and main ideas of the book, and reflect it on the time period. The lesson plan utilizes several different tools in Google, such as Google blogger (as a means of creating a class discussion online), Google Earth (to show students specific places described in the book), Google Docs (to set up a presentation in order to summarize a part of the book for other students), and other tools. These tools would be used not only by the teacher, but also by the students in order to create presentations and points about the book on their own. This would mean that students would be using digital technology as a resource for information as well as a means of creativity towards understanding the historical time period.
I actually think it is a well thought-out lesson and I would have never thought to have used the tools the way that this teacher outlined the lesson to. I could possibly see myself using a lesson like this one in the future.