Final Project

For my final project I decided to create a blog for my 8th grade physical science class as well as my 9th biology class. I teach 2 sections of 8th grade, so I have a total of 28 students. In 9th grade I teach a selective honors section of only 14. Because of this difference in numbers, my approach to the class blog varied from grade to grade.

It should also be noted that we are lucky enough at my school to have all of our student email accounts linked to google and gmail (even though they are private). Therefore all google tools are accessible through these accounts. This makes this process much easier!!!

Here's the breakdown:

8th Grade

I decided to create one blog for all students in my two classes to use. I will use this space to make announcements, post information on assignments (we already have a class website provided by the school, so this function may vary a bit depending on the necessary explanation for each assignment...), share and discuss lab results, and also to write weekly reflections or post links to current event articles. This last type of post will typed up in red. Students are responsible for making two comments on these red posts each month. Each comment will be graded on a scale from 1-5. A total of 10 points will be given out each month. These points will be totaled at the end of each trimester and account for 15% of students overall grades. (info on this grading scale can be found in more detail under the tab at the tab of the blog)

Here is a link to the class blog: State What Matters

9th Grade

These students are more advanced and there are less of them. For these two reasons I decided to give the students in this class a bit more independence and ownership over their blogging. I have created a class blog that will be used by me to post announcements, assignments, lab report info/results, and an occasional reflection. Each student in the class will spend the first week of school putting together their own blog that will be linked to the class blog. Assignments posted on the class blog will be completed on personal blogs. Students will be expected to comment on each other's work as well (specifics of this will vary and will be clarified on the class blog when an assignment is presented).

Here is a link to the class blog: The Bio Hub.

Also, if you are thinking about making a class blog or having students create blogs, this article from the edublogger is very useful and thought provoking.....just thought I'd share. It helped me a lot while going through this process.