As students begin exploring an issue, either self directed or from a teacher prompt, within their blogs I would like them to use a writing/research cycle that includes:

Zotero: as a research management tool
Diigo: as a social bookmarking and highlighting site
Wordpressmu: as the writing/commenting platform

With Zotero students will learn how to use an extremely effective research tool. Zotero makes it quite easy for students to store and create a reference section for links that support and extends their writing. With Diigo students will learn about social bookmarking. Through having each student become part of a collaborative group they would be exposed to the power of social bookmarking. In addition, using Diigo’s highlighting capabilities they can be asked to highlight key ideas and new vocabulary terms they encounter. This is a map of my ideas so far. Blogging Cycle

teachNbabble - just a place to babble (photos: scenes from our travels)

Through my RSS feeds I came across “Here’s What I Said On Educational blogging! What Would You Say?” by Sue Waters. After listening to her speak on Ustream and following the different links on her post I began considering what we are doing with our blogs at SSIS.

We have are beginning to get both, prompt based and student initiated blogging, within the classes using our blogging system. It is great to see some teachers starting to use a blog as part of day to day class instruction even though our PD sessions have been targeting Moodle. In terms of blog layout and structure students are better able to personalize their blogs, add blogrolls, graphics and widgets to their blogs.

We have a few things to continue to examine. Many students do not speak English as their first language and sometimes their writing reflects this. We are still trying to educate our school audience as to the “work in progress nature of writing” as it relates to blogging.

In addition, I need to look at:

• how we can get students participating more fully with commenting?
• more clearly defining the tools I would like the students to use as they write and research online.
• how we can make subscribing to student comments as easy as the tag based subscription to student posts?

teachNbabble - just a place to babble (photos: scenes from our travels)