Thing 1: Blogging

Hello and welcome to my first blog post!

My name is Jessica Bates and I am a Social Studies teacher at East Upper School. This year I am currently teaching Pre APWH, APWH, and a Global Condensed class! I want to take part in this program because I am very interested in educational technology. In the spring I will be finishing my certification to become an Educational Technology Specialist and I am looking forward to getting to know more "cool tools". I really want to spread technology at East High School and help my students become 21st century learners. In this digital age many more things are being switched to online technology like online courses and job opportunities and we need to prepare our scholars for this shift. 

I am really interested in using blogging in the classroom to get students more comfortable with writing and analyzing. From John Spencer's article Thirteen Ways to Boost Student Blogging,  I was really drawn to having students use blogs to encourage discourse. Currently I use Schoology's discussion board platforms to promote discourse but lately students have not been as thoughtful in their responses. I wonder if they felt they had ownership of their own content and thoughts in a blog, that it might be more thoughtful. I was also drawn to his tip of using "photo prompts" in blogs as there are countless thought provoking historical photos that would lead to more student writing which I want to encourage as many of my students do the very bare minimum or one to two sentences. I also learned how to set expectations for blogs and digital citizenship which our students need to be made more aware of. After completing this lesson I will have students set up blogs through Google's Blogger that will be linked to their accounts. This way when they are absent or otherwise not in class, they can still monitor their learning on their own and show me they now understand the content.