Student 2.0-Creating content for the world
I love reading student writing on the web!
From teentek.com
Forget about visiting websites! Make them come to you!
Scientists at the U.S laboratory. “Scientists say trained bees can sniff bombs.†October 28, 2006. Rotero. 15 Jan 2007 .
-Summary
After reading this article, I realized that trained bees can sniff out bombs. Scientist at the U.S laboratory says that they trained bees that could sniff out bombs for the U.S security or the Iraq war. Also, the researchers at the ‘Los Alamos National Laboratory’ said that they trained bees that could stick out their proboscis (a tube to feed on nectar (a sugary liquid made by many flowering plants)). Let’s take me for an example, if I was a fuel researcher for Iraq at the U.S Army Center, I would choose the trained bees to sniff the fuels, or the bombs in order to destroy the bombs in Iraq since there are a lot of explosive things in Iraq……..
[tags]SAS, teentek, sciencegeeks, student blogs[/tags]
Technorati Tags: teentek, sciencegeeks, blogs, education
I know, I’m a total downer at times but your examples are exactly what worry me about the use of blogs in education. When I first tested the use of blogs with students last year I quickly learned that like everything else we do with students, assignments required purpose, guidance, and practice but I see very little evidence of this when I read examples of student work online.
Your first student example about netvibes is fine but there is no evidence of analysis. It just sounds like a summary of something the student was told or could have read on http://www.netvibes.com Should we expect more from work that deserves to be “published?” No, not always, but we should demand it more often than is the case.
The second example is an interesting topic but the paragraph doesn’t actually make much sense. If this were a draft then I would say great job and tell the student to continue the editing process, but, this didn’t happen. Instead, a draft has been “published” as we love to say in the edublogosphere (is this a word?) but I don’t think it deserved to be and yet you chose it as one of only two examples for why you love to read student work online.
If we continue to praise students for mediocre or at least unfinished work simply because it’s been published online for a global audience, what message are we sending to students and educators?
Reece,
I guess it depends what you are trying to get out of your blog. Some teachers allow students to freely write, almost like a journal. Others do like you suggest and only allow “publishable” work to be made public to the world. I guess it depends on what you as a teacher are expecting from your blog entries.
The first blog entry comes from teentek.com. A site created by and for teenagers to review technology. I found the post great because the students in that class are starting to use RSS feeds and see the power in using this technology to the point that they felt like writing about it. In this class, you are not graded on your writing skills…although the students help each other and take great pride in their posts, you are graded on the ideas, the recommendations, and participation in creating a site that has had 10,000 visitors.
The second student example from sciencegeeks is a great look at how blogs can add to a deeper understanding and interest in science. Did you read the whole post? I think this teacher is doing a great job of having student find information, reflect on it, post about it, and cite it. Is the writing perfect? No, but the ideas and the connections to information are. In this class the blog is done as an homework assignment, one in which the students enjoy doing. I wonder how much time students spend on a post. Finding, evaluating, writing and posting the about the science news they’ve found?
In both of these cases the blogs, I think, are impacting the students education. Allowing students at teentek to explore the world of technology and freely write about what they think is cool, and at sciencegeeks exposing students to science news that they would not seek out on their own. Of course the part that is not posted here is the discussions that happen in the classroom around the postings. That is where the real education is…in the conversations that take place in the classroom among the students.
This vs That…
Social Bookmarking / Notetaking
This is where the real confusion comes for me. I have now tried /am currently using Del.icio.us, Diigo, Google Notebook, and Zotero (a Firefox extension) and really don’t know which best suits my needs. I have foun…