Friday, September 5, 2008

Student Posting Guidelines and Goals

So far I've shown them all how to log in and write an entry. So I shouldn't have been surprised when I gave them an assignment "look up peak oil, and leave a comment to this post about 'what is peak oil?' in your own words" that they all left entries and not comments. huh. Certainly these are bright kids, but I just didn't teach them how to leave a "comment" and so they did what I had shown them.

Meanwhile, I need to come up with a brief sheet about goals for blog use and guidelines for a good entry or comment.
Why am I having them do this? Why is it important?
1) I want them to learn from each other. This is a place to ask questions.
2) I want give them the opportunity to teach each other. I want them to be able to communicate their learning. It's about decentralizing the source of knowledge.
3) I want them to know how to use this technology (as April said) safely and effectively.


Guidelines for a good post:
1) Include content (ex: acceleration is..., the equation for velocity is...)
2) Include general activities (ex: today we did an Agree/Disagree activity)
3) Include homework
4) Tie in outside sources, other websites, pictures (make sure to site them!), java applets, whatever that helps explain the content.
5) Sign your first name at the end!
6) follows rules from the contract - respectful and clean, science-relevant, no last names, locations, or other identifying qualities, make sure you've dealt appropriately with any copyright issues.


Guidelines for a good comment:
Either
1) ask a question about physics or
2) attempt to answer someone else's question about physics,
3) it can be just something cool that you found on the internet that's relevant to science, the post, or what we're doing in class.
Aaaaand it must follow all the rules from the contract.

Perhaps I'll have people post 2x a week either a post or a comment. Should it be more? 2x a week would be like 8x a month, that's a fair amount, eh?

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