Today I reviewed the directions on how to write the project proposal. I peeked into a number of shared proposals that students shared on Google Docs. Most of them did not follow directions and wrote out a phrase or sentence rather than explicitly stating what they were going to do for their projects.
I spent a little bit of time showing how they can turn their project from, "We will be reviewing movies," to "We are going to create a website where we review movies for a teenage audience. We're going to share a teenager's perspective on films rather than the ones done by professionals who are more than double our age..." Below is a screen shot from the first section of one student's project description.
The examples I used last weekend to show how to write the proposal were quickly forgotten, as many students had no urgency to complete or begin the project last week, as it is due tonight by midnight.
The other agenda item was to show students how to setup up a Blogger account. Since all of my students have Gmail, Docs, and Drive, they already have access to Blogger. Blogger also has a mobile app and allows students to blog from their phones in case they don't have a computer at home.
Below are links that shows step-by-step how to setup a Blogger account, avoiding beginner's mistakes, and the top 25 bloggers and their blogs. What I did in class however was invite a student up to create their Blogger account on the computer that is projected to the class so they could see the process for themselves. I had students title their blogs "Joe Rebel's 20 Percent Project." I recommended they use their names and SHS (Savanna High School) for their blogspot url, for example www.joerebelshs.blogspot.com.
I showed them how to create a post and publish.
Students have a week between Wednesday and Wednesday to create one blog entry set at 150 words (from Kevin Brookhouser) and a picture of what they accomplished or worked on this week.
As far as grades are concerned, since we're spending 20% of our class time working on the project, their work will be 20% of their grade. I will only be grading three things, which are all writing based. They will be graded on their proposal, blogs, and a comment on another student's blog.
I know that grading should not be a motivator, but I feel I have to keep kids accountable for their work.
Pretty soon I'll have links to all the student blogs on the right side of this page for you to peruse. Starting next week students should be in full swing working on their projects.
Resources
http://www.wikihow.com/Start-a-Blog-on-Blogger
http://www.wikihow.com/Avoid-Common-Beginner-Blogger-Mistakes
http://techland.time.com/2013/08/05/the-25-best-bloggers-2013-edition/slide/all/
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