Making Curriculum Pop

 

Reading blogs engage students but can be overwhelming to read and grade.  

Share your strategies, too.  Many are planning now for fall classes.  Here's one of mine.

To increase student participation and reduce grading time for you, you may find it useful at least one quarter, to have students sign up for teams and then respond a specific number of times to postings by members of another team. 

 

When using kind of organization, I had a set of four to six prompts and students were asked to post in response each one at least once during the unit, and then comment on the responses of three members in their target group.

For example, you may have five teams of five and have the students sign-up on the class wiki.  Everyone was to post their own comment by a specific date.  Everyone, then was to respond to three classmates by a second specific date.  Usually 3-4 days later. Between assignments, there is time to read and record initial posting and adjust class lessons based on what is observed. 

No, it didn’t take students long to understand and follow this plan, student choice, teacher control assignment.  They seemed to enjoy the choice of prompts and the option to respond to their choice of classmate postings.

 

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Orange

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Week One: Blue responds to Red; Red to Green; Green to Purple; Purple to Orange; Orange to Blue.

Week Two: Blue to Green; Red to Purple; Green to Orange: Purple to Blue; Orange to Red.

Week Three: Blue to Purple; Red to Orange; Green to Blue; Purple to Red; Orange to Green.

Week Four: Students’ Choice

 

For ease in grading, students include their team color in the subject line of their post.

For other ideas, see TEACHING ENGLISH LANGUAGE ARTS, my website that also includes resources and recommendations by other educators.

 

 

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Replies to This Discussion

Can you say more about this assignment?  Is the reading blog where students record their nightly reading in self-selected books, or where they answer the teacher's questions about a book the whole class is reading?

Susan, this is generally an assignment used for a common reading.  I also have used it to invite students feedback on classmates’ drafts of essays and speeches.  With a little tweeking, the structure is quite flexible.  However, I’d not recommend it for daily check-ups when students are reading self-selected books.  It becomes cumbersome for you and the students to keep up with several different books. 

 

My goal for this kind of assignment is to have students post their own thoughts and have others comment or respond.  If students all are reading different books, it would be difficult to sustain conversations over an extended period of time.  But, you could use it for pairs of books and create teams so that students comment with those reading the partner book.  The pairings need not be the same book;  they could be books by same author; on same topic; or in same setting.

 

To maintain focus, you could limit postings to 3-5 sentences.  If students are blogging about a common book, you could ask for 4,3,2,1 responses  or for PIE postings.  State a point or position in response to their chosen prompt; illustrate the reason for that opening statement using a specific  reference to or quotation from  the reading (with page number in parenthesis), and then explain the link between that illustrative quotation or reference to text. 

 

Having sentence stems helps some students, especially early in the year for the first round of responses.  See Reader Response Prompt Cards.or those from ReadWriteThink. Or use such prompts as 20 Literature Response Questions for Any Book.

 

A second feature is that all the posting can be viewed by whole class or all classes, but the assignment need  not be overwhelming with students having to decide to whom they should or could respond.  By building in some structure in terms of teams and targets, students only have to read the postings of their target team and then choose to respond to 2-3 (or whatever number required in your assignment).  But, all students can read all postings thus giving them the benefit of a broad range of insights, similar to a rich class discussion.

 

The third, but maybe primary feature for you, the teacher, is that you have access to all the students’ initial postings two or three days before their classmates are required to respond.  So, it should not take you long to view and record grades for the first part of the assignment.  Then a few days later, you can read student responses.  Again, you can view everything, but only have to read two or three from each student.  Because students have 2-3 days to respond-post 3-5 sentence feedback, you can begin reading as soon as students begin posting, thus reducing task of reading all postings and responses at same time.

 Re: Grading:  Consider 100 points for whole unit with 4 required rounds of postings and responding with each round:  25 points - 10 points for posting correctly on time (not necessarily grammatically, but in direct response to the assignment) 15 points for responding thoughtfully and courteously to 3 classmates. (5 points per response).  Students usually get full credit for on-time postings.   I do not grade for “right” or “wrong”,but for “supported” or “unsupported” responses. The purpose is to have students reading, thinking and responding.  Yes, some will appear to copy or mimic others postings.  That doesn’t happen often when students have choices about the prompts to which they can respond.

 

Rather than comment personally on every posting, you could keep notes and make comments verbally in class. Of course, it is difficult not to write something on those postings done particularly well and ion those who need guidance because of poor taste.  If one is really bad, I “hide” it so students cannot read them and call the writer aside for a “little talk.”:-)

 

Instead in class, you would commend their fine work, mentioning some particularly effective features.  Students soon learn what is valued and they begin writing more thorough initial posts and more thoughtful responses.

 Feel free to ask further questions.

 

 

 

Anna, thank you for your detailed reply.  I really like this idea and think it could work.  Especially because the blogging platform I use (Edublogs) lets me hold all comments until I publish them, so students would not be able to see each other's responses until published, and I could do them all at once.

I will check out all the links you included, and am also looking into your website and book.

Thanks again.

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