Sunday, July 28, 2013

Year of the Guinea Pig!

So, beginning with the 2013/2014 school year, all Upper School students at Marshall will have laptops and bring them to class each day.  That will change things in ways I can imagine (I'll never have to sign out or bring my students to a computer lab ever again!) and ways I can't (ask me at the end of the year!).

I'm very excited about all the possibilities.  I can plan for more in-class writing opportunities, and I can also take immediate advantage of ideas for technology-based activities that arise in the course of a lesson or class discussion.

One possibility I want to explore is blogging.  I hope to be able to get each senior in the class of 2014 to blog regularly.  What will students do in their blog posts?  I'll ask them to explore and reflect on
  • what we're reading, studying, and discussing in class; 
  • their ideas for papers and projects;
  • their experiences during their final year at Marshall;
  • and their college application and decision process.
I also hope that their blogs will eventually become a place where they can share parts of who they are with the school community by posting creative pieces in all kinds of media (writing, photography, music, video, etc).

Besides writing/creating their blogs, I hope students will also read their classmates' blogs, so that eventually we'll have a digital writing community in which everyone is sharing thoughts and ideas all the time.  

This is going to be a year of experiments, for teachers and students, and while we won't always be successful in everything we try, I hope we will all be willing to take some risks, do new things, and see what happens!  Let's all be guinea pigs together!

5 comments:

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  2. I just did one, too, but I haven't written anything. I don't think that I'll have my students make them, at least not in the first semester. You can be the test case.

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