Blogging: CEE Roundtable

In this roundtable session, for the Conference of English Education (CEE) Commission on New Literacies, at the National Council of English Convention, I focus on how teachers and teacher candidates in my Integrating Technology and Literacy course learn to use blogging. Most come to the course with no or little experience as bloggers. One goal of the course is for them to leave with confidence to implement blogging into their own teaching. Thus, the slide presentation includes a few such samples.

The full slide presentation is embedded below:

The slide presentation is also available to view at SlideShare.net. To view it there, click on this link: http://www.slideshare.net/JudyArzt/ncte13-blogging-roundtable

http://www.slideshare.net/JudyArzt/ncte13-blogging-roundtable

Here I offer a brief summary and links to some key resources.

Access to Main Course Blog: Integrating Technology and Literacy

Once you access the blog, note the page tabs on the top to access Class Lists. You will find more than 50 blogs to explore. Remember that most of the students in the course were blogging for the first time and just learning how to use the selected blogging platform.

Quick Links to Student Blogs:

Access to class listings for fall 2013 to access students' blogs: Blogs, Fall 2013 (2 classes)

Access to class listings of spring 2013 to access students' blogs: Blogs, Spring 2013 (3 classes)

Access to class listings of spring 2012 to access students' blogs: Blogs, Spring 2012 (2 classes)

Mr. Boylen's Class Blogs 2013-2014

• Language Arts: Mr.Boylen's LA Class, 2013-2014 (8th graders): The students in my Fall 2013 Integrating Technology and Literacy course wrote replies to blog posts written by the language arts students. The language arts students titled their posts, "Introduction to Connecticut Teachers."

As a result of this experience, several of the teachers in the course implemented blogging with their students using the KidBlog platform.

• Literature: My Boylen's Literature Class, 2013-2014 (7th graders): The literature students blog about books they read and related topics. They are participating in The Global Read Aloud, reading Sharon Draper's book Out of My Mind. Some teachers in my course who are reading this book with their students had their students read and respond to Mr. Boylen's students' posts. Notice, once you access Literature: My Boylen's Literature Class, 2013-2014 that a sidebar contains a blog roll to access other classes' blogs. One of the class is listed is that of a teacher in my class: Mrs. Simon's Class. Her class joined the Global Read Aloud and started a class blog, with students in other classes responding.

Interested in learning about how a variety of teachers have implemented blogging in the classroom and their reason for doing so, check this article, in draft form (in Google Doc format), I had published in the November 2013 issue of Connecticut Reading Association Journal:

"Online Collaborative Inquiry: Blogging Ventures and Multiple Literacies."

The article includes many examples of how blogging is used in class contexts as well as hyperlinks to access the blogs and other resources.

Students in my Integrating Technology and Literacy Classes have access via our course website to a web page with links to access class and teacher blogs. Here's a link to a duplicate copy of that web page. Some of the blogs are from the 2012-2013 school year, when I first created the web page, but the links in numerous cases will take a viewer to blogs that are still maintained: See this web Page: Blogging Samples

In this course reflection video, one of the students in the Integrating Technology and Literacy course, tell about the use of blogging and related course projects.