Peggy and I had our first integrated lesson on Friday. It was excellent! The kids were so receptive and excited about blogging. At the very last minute we decided to test out the comments feature on our blog by having the students research one “acceptable” current events article and one “unacceptable” article and post their results as a comment. I’ve been checking the blog all weekend to see what the kids post. I love the idea that we can communicate even after class is over. I especially love the idea that we are not wasting paper by printing out all these articles and that the students can utilize the blog in class next lesson to share what they learned about researching current events.

However, I definitely have to figure out a more secure method for turning in homework, because I don’t like the idea of just letting anyone comment on our blog without being registered. I remember reading something on Landrum’s Bits and Bytes about how to utilize the edublogs/learnerblogs community more effectively. Hopefully that will work for us too! I realize that the more I learn about new technology the more I need to learn. I definitely enjoy testing out new tools with my students and I know that it takes actual experience with these tools for me to really learn how to use them.

Next up: the students will create their own blogs on learnerblogs.org. They are going to love that!