Blogging Poetry
Posted by Janice on June 9, 2009 in Blogging, Language Arts, Teacher Voices
Kristi Dahlstrom, Language Arts/Journalism teacher at Ingraham high school created a collaborative poetry project with one of her Language Arts 9 classes. Students have been writing and refining their poetry over the last few weeks in preparation for publishing to the class blog.
Besides learning to write poetry, students learned to write specific praise and constructive criticism for commenting on each other’s work. They practiced this element of the project on poems posted to the blog by Kristi and her student teacher. Kristi observed, “Students are now posting their own work and commenting with maturity and grace! Success!”
You can see their project by going to http://www.msdahlstrom.edublogs.org
Kristi says, “I set up a class blog using Edublogs called The Ninth Wall, and created usernames for each of the students in my class. This was time-consuming, requiring me to split one email address 25 times to create unique usernames, but it takes several steps out of the process, including the tricky one that requires students to have email accounts, which many do not. I used Gmail, adding numbers and letters (1A, 1B, 1C, etc.) after a plus sign and before the @gmail.com. For example, an account address would have been ingraham.la.student+1L@gmail.com. It worked very well, allowing me to keep track of passwords through a single account. For more on how to set up this type of gmail account click here.
After setting up the accounts, Kristi asked each student to submit at least one poem to the blog to form a class anthology. Before the poems were published to the blog they went through an editing stage. After being edited, the poems were turned in to Kristi and she posted them to the site. To make sure that the students’ comments were serious, Kristi gave herself complete moderating control. This takes teacher time, but is worth it for the quality of comment she is asking of her students.
If you ask Kristi if all the time spent was worth it, she says: “This has been the most enjoyable project! I would highly recommend it.”
Resources:
http://www.edublogs.org
Why Should I Blog with My Students
June 12th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
Well done, Kristi.
Be honest: what do you think of edublogs?