Blogging for class
Marc Mayfield, who teaches at LaGrange High School in LaGrange, Georgia is making interesting use of blogs for his AP Comparative Government and Politics classes.There's a primary blog, Mayfield's AP Comparative Government Class, where he offers information about the course, upcoming tests, as well as relevant and interesting ideas.
But teams of students in each of his classes are responsible for creating entries about each of the countries they are studying. That means there are 2 subsidiary blogs about each of the AP6 (China, Great Britain, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, and Russia). There's an assigned quota of entries for each team and Mayfield has published the rubric he uses for grading each entry. If students read each other's entries, this will be a great supplement to their other readings.
Links to the main blog and all 12 student-run blogs can be found at the User Profile page.
Marc wrote, "So far blogging has been a great success getting the students motivated and interested in learning about their assigned countries.
"The second week of current events blogging just ended. So as you can imagine there are still a few issues and problems that need to be addressed. The students have responded better than I had hoped. It gives them an opportunity to be creative, learn valuable research skills, become technologically savvy, and have fun learning.
"Luckily we have the access to the technology and can go tot the computer lab 2 or 3 times a week as needed."
This is inventive and I think will be very helpful to students at LaGrange HS. Most students could probably do this kind of blogging from home or the library if you don't have the lab facilities Marc's school offers. If you're familiar with blogging (or if you become familiar with the process), this would be easy to set up and not burdensome to monitor and evaluate.
Marc has put a post on his blog offering advice and answers to questions if you'd like to ask him about setting up a similar blogging system. He has also alerted his students that their work might be looked at by outsiders and seen as models for other blogging projects.
Labels: pedagogy
posted by Ken Wedding @ 9:58 PM
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