I have completed a unit timeline for this project; looking at my goals for these activities, factoring in that we will be covering other curriculum throughout the semester, and the activities necessary for success. I feel that I have successfully created a plan that will allow me to implement this project quickly on the front end, have the students "buy-in" to the idea, and then allow this project to run in the background more as a "participation points" activity throughout the semester. The end result of this project looks much like I have envisioned from the beginning. I did have to narrow the focus and scope of the RSS feeds due to the fact that it was just becoming too large and time consuming for the students. I also reduced the frequency of the students reviewing the feeds to three times a week instead of everyday. When looking at the fact that this project is a semester long project, the fact that we will be focusing on other curriculum in the class, understanding student’s workloads in other classes could be heavy at times, extra-curricular activities, and life...I felt that every day may be a bit much. I believe that three times a week is a fair expectation. I have maintained the required weekly blog post because I feel that writing across curriculum is extremely important. I have also reviewed several sights on the internet and found an exceptional tutorial that shows how to link all of my student’s blogs together on Netvibes at one time! This tutorial will save me an unbelievable amount of time; I can now use one lab day to have each of my students create their own personal blog in Blogger and then I can simply link all of our blogs to the class page in Netvibes. This was a key element to the success of this project. My students and I will now simply log into Netvibes and instantly see and have access to all of the blog posts as they are submitted. From this, we can watch and respond to each other’s posts without having to visit each blog individually. I believe by having these blogs linked and the ease of access will facilitate a more open discussion platform between my students. I have also had allot of success in finding online and interactive tools for my students to work with the World Geography portion of this project. By combining the geography tools with the current events portion of the project using Blogger and Netvibes I have had great success in implementing this project. I am now in the phase where I am developing individual lesson plans that I will insert throughout the semester to constantly remain connected to this project and the assignments while still allowing for the other curriculum areas we will cover throughout the semester. Once I find a permanent teaching job and know what subject area I will be teaching, I will simply plug this project into that class's semester outline and build the curriculum for the class around this project's time frame. I believe this will be a relatively simple task now that I have completed this project, built the necessary tools for implementation, and finished the unit outline.
In using this experience to plan for future projects of this nature I believe the greatest lesson I will take with me is that the key to success is in the planning. If you want to successfully implement something into your class, you have to plan for it upfront and assure that you will dedicate the time and resources necessary for it to be successful. Also, if I was to tackle something like this again or if I was to give advice to a colleague looking at a similar project, I would stress the need for it to be accessible and easy to use. If my students were required to go out onto the internet and visit lots of websites to find news sources or if they were required to visit one another's blogs individually on a weekly basis, this project would be finished before it ever started. However, by adding Netvibes to the mix and having everything updated and accessible in one location, this project has an excellent chance of not only being successful, but being duplicated by my friends and colleagues in their classrooms.
Overall, I am extremely happy with the outcome of this project and cannot wait to use it in the classroom. However, I also could not wait to see how high school students would react to this project. So, I contacted high school ages kids of family and friends and ran the project by them to see what their initial reaction is. If teenagers are one thing, they are brutally honest. I was excited to see that out of the 9 students I talked to, 8 saw this as a really cool idea and something they wish their own teachers would do. While this is a very small sampling, and they haven't had to do the work yet (LOL!!!), I am energized by their response!
Where can I find this tutorial about adding multiple blog feeds to Netvibes at once??
ReplyDeleteThat's great that you could run the project by some high school aged students -- "I wish my teacher would do this" is certainly a good sign for your own implementation of the project! If I try to think back to high school social studies, I feel I would have enjoyed this project a lot, and that it would have helped me stay in touch with current events and learn more about geography (and care more about it). Good luck with the future implementation!