This week our school administered the PSAT to all of our 10th grade students during our 20 Percent Day. No one consulted me about how it might conflict with my schedule, but that's how life goes. I did not have my 2nd, 3rd, or 4th periods yesterday so I just wrote it off as a break for the students. I was thinking about a break as well, but I wanted to keep my weekly habit going. I also worked on grading the blogs. The requirements were 150 words per week with a picture.
It's really neat to read their blogs and to comment on them. I'm trying to leave encouraging remarks while moving them towards progress. I must admit that this is quite a task to go in and comment on every students blog. And when you leave a comment, you have to put in those dreaded, "Please prove you're not a robot" words and number combination.
One of the biggest problems that I've encountered with this project is having the kids blogging about what they are doing on a weekly basis. I understand that some students don't have Internet access, but we've had computers in class weekly as well as accessing their blogs form the mobile app on their phones. If they really wanted to do it, they could have done it.
About half of the kids have setup their blogs and are putting in good efforts. So students had a week from Wednesday to Wednesday to do a blog post to show their progress, but what do you when you don't meet on that day? Some students are behind, and so what do they do? Some students have not even started blogging, when they finally begin, where will they begin?
I think that I'll just give students the number of the blog they are on, on the Google Calendar I have on my website. I'll just tell them so that I can grade the blog based on the week they do it, rather than when they do it. For example, a student that sets up and begins his blog during this week 3 will not write "Blog Week 1" rather they will just write, "Blog Week 3."
I think I'll have my TAs grade that they are posting, and I'll go through and comment a class a week perhaps, maybe two if I can get to it. It's too bad that viewing other people's blogs on Blogger is blocked, because I think that it would be neat for the kids to comment on each other's blog and develop a real audience.
I'm going to have to figure out how to get people to start commenting on the students' blogs so that they can take pride in writing the posts and the satisfaction of seeing that their project is of interest to someone out there on the World Wide Web.
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