journal_4

Journal #4
“Five Don’ts of Classroom Blogging” by Julie Sturgeon

In this article, Sturgeon discussed the rules on the blogging. There are five don’ts: just dive in, confuse blogging with social networking, leap at the freebies, force a sequential style, and leave the blogging to the student. I like the first rule most. The teacher should have a couple of early sessions with students to talk about the proper conduct. For me, this is like we learn the transportation rules before we really drive out vehicle on the road. It takes us some time to learn and master it. However, it is not waste time. On the contrary, we will get benefit from it in the long run. We can not just drive the mobiles on high way without any rules in our mind. That is definitely the last thing we want to do in this world. "The important thing is not to just jump in and blog, but spend the time letting students see samples, understand guidelines, and anticipate blogging and what it can mean to their learning," Anne Davis says. "The time you spend will pay off for you double when you get down to it, because they want to blog well.
On the other hand, there is one do in this article is: recognize what blogging can do for your students. Blog can help students stretch themselves from writing paragraphs to essays. In addition for the writing, students are very interested in working with image, video and music on the web blogging. Besides these benefits, blogging is more handy and efficient than our traditional writing. Students can explore, discover, and create more. They can simulate their plan and get the result right away.
In conclusion, I found there were many good ideas and suggestions included in this article. I am looking forward to apply these rules in my blog when I teach my students.

Questions…
1. How to set the detail rules on the blogging?
I think teacher should have good samples to demonstrate what teacher expects from the students. In the samples, they should include: the format, the way to put comments, and the text related content. If anyone abuses the blogging, he or she will lose the privilege to access the Blog for certain time.

2. How to use the Blog to help the students from writing paragraphs to essays?
Teacher should encourage students to write their on-line journal as much as they can. First, students only can write a couple of sentences. Teacher can read and give positive feedback, “Good job! Keep on going!” Students will write more next times. The peer can review it, “Hey, awesome ideas!” They will keep on writing more and more sentences, to paragraphs, and to essays. Just step by step with a lot of encouragement and comments.