Blogging in the Science Classroom...An Idea....From Birth...at EdCamp MSP

In physical science, I wanted to start Blogging as a district literacy initiative.  I did a lot of pre-research on Blogging and different Blogging platforms, and after EdCampMSP, I decided to move forward with Kidblog.  I proposed a session at EdCampMSP that I wanted to learn more about blogging and the do’s and don'ts, and it turned out to be a pretty popular session.  The creators of Kidblog were there and answered a lot of questions that people had about their product.  What caught my eye was the controlled environment.  The blogs were not visible by the outside world, yet students could see each other's blogs and I had control over students being able to post and being able to comment on each others blogs.  What I was worried about initially, was selling “Kidblog” to my high school students.  The blogging platform was designed for K-12 students, but I was worried that my students would not buy into the name.  Not only was I impressed with the control that I could have over their posts and comments, I was also pleased with how easy it was to navigate. Students questioned at first but were sold with the K-12 approval on the website.

Before I could allow my students to start blogging, I felt that it was very important to take the time to discuss digital citizenship and what it means to leave a positive digital footprint.  I used some of the ideas from our summer writing course to put this three day lesson together. Here are previous blog Entries on our digital citizenship lessons:

Digital Citizenship Lesson: What is your Digital Footprint?

Digital Citizenship Lesson:  Part 2

The timing happened to workout that we had just concluded a unit on speed and velocity, and were moving into waves, so we used the topic of speedometers and radar guns as our premise to move into the new unit on waves.  This gave us a topic to research and exercise our digital citizenship skills.

It was after we showed students this video Digital Footprints:  Your First New Impression that we introduced their first blog entry:

Speedometers, Radar Guns, Digital Citizenship, and Footprints….What do they have in common?

A.)  In your first post, please choose ONE of the following three writing prompts to write about:
1)  You are a police officer and have just pulled someone over for speeding.  Please a) Discuss how your radar gun works.  b)  Talk about some factors that may cause interference with your radar gun.
2)  You were just pulled over by the police officer.  a)  Please demonstrate to him that you are a good citizen and that you should be let off the hook because you know how your speedometer works.  Please also discuss the factors that would lead to a variance in the speed being read by your speedometer.
3) We have just concluded a unit on speed, velocity, and acceleration and began discussing speedometers and radar guns. b)  Please discuss how they both relate to the previous unit that we studied, and describe how they relate to the unit that we are moving into.

B)  Please also reflect on how you are going to act as a “good digital citizen.”  In what ways are you going to create a positive digital footprint?

Here are a few of my favorite blog entries.  It was very hard to choose!:

Student 1: AllSports100

101 Police Trouble
Phase 1:
On a normal casual snowy day a student in a passenger seat  riding to school with her mom and little brother. All of a sudden out of nowhere in the review mirror are bright blue and red lights flashes and pulls us over. Reluctantly the front seat driver rolls down the window and asks  ”whats wrong Officer?” and he replies back in a monotone voice, “Ma’am you have been speeding under by 10 m/h you realize and I’m afraid I’m going to have to give you a ticket”, As he says this he is scribbling up a ticket for us. The kid in the front seat leans over and says, “Excuse me officer your radar gun may have misread our Speedometer because our tires are smaller than usual for this Cadillac”. The Officer scratches his black stingy goatee considering the cons and pros. “How do you know this kid”, He says. “I’m a student at Kettle Moraine High School in Ms. Kornowski’s class who’s making us write a blog about Speedometer’s situations and how they work Officer”, The student replies. Meanwhile the other two just keep quite like mindless zombies not knowing what to do. As time passes the Student explains that the snowflakes, tires, other cars, or personal belongings might have set the radar accuracy off by 12%. The Officer scratches his goatee again and says “Alright Ma’am, your off the hook. I’ll give you a warning though to go faster next time and get those tire’s fix’d soon; I’d hate to see you get a ticket just ’cause of tire size”. The front seat person gave her thank you’s and said that she’ll change them tomorrow right away. Once the Officer got in his car and was gone; The Mom turned her head to the child that just saved there butts from getting a ticket said “Honey, I’m going to make sure you get an A+ for this and a stop at Culver’s”. The student just gave a goofy grin back and said “You know I’m not going to let this down right?”. the Driver just gave a annoyed sigh and kept driving.
Phase 2:
I’m going to be a Good Digital Citizen by not sharing my personal information with anyone, Staying on safe websites, Doing what I’m suppose to do, Being safe, Don’t post stuff that you might or will regret later on , Don’t post 2 stuff that you don’t really know about, And have a subconscious that someone is always Narking on me watching my ever single mouse click. My Positive Digital Footprint will be created by my security on my computer and having a Add Blocker up’n running.

Student 2:  Whispering Ocean
A radar gun is used to measure the speed of moving objects. It is used in Law Enforcement, and sports such as baseball, tennis, and running. It can be hand held, vehicle-mounted, or static. Police used speed guns, which use Doppler radar to perform speed measurements.
A Radar Gun is used to send out radio waves of specific frequencies in a chosen direction. The traveling waves then bounce off objects, including vehicles, and return to the radar gun’s receiving station.
Weather conditions such as humidity, fog, and rain are all particles in the atmosphere that create a barrier, and are considered interference. It negatively affects the signal.
Posting responsibly, thinking before you write, and being aware of how your words can affect other people are my main goals to be a good digital citizen.

Student 3:  Dancer5

A radar gun measures how fast a vehicle is moving. When you point it at a moving object, it sends off radio waves that bounce off the object and return to the radar gun.  The radar gun waves are called the Doppler shift. The Doppler shift uses light waves to calculate how fast the moving object is going. Some things that can interfere with the radar gun’s radio waves are other vehicles or objects and weather sometimes is a big factor. When you see a police man shooting radar, he or she usually takes the speed of the car that is ahead of the group or the cars behind the group. That way it is easier to take their speed because there aren’t other cars blocking the waves.

I am going to act as a good digital citizen by not including my personal information on the Internet. People can easily look you up online and find all of your personal information if you post it somewhere. I’m also not going to be addicted to my phone. I think that using it sometimes if fine, but I don’t always have it with me and using it at all times.

Reflection of Round One of Blogging:

Overall, things went really well.  This writing assignment was formative and not all students were able to finish and post their work despite numerous reminders.  We plan on having blog entries as benchmark assignments in the future.  Some of the take away lessons from our first round of blogs:

1).  Have students enter in their emails in their profile.  A handful of students forgot their passwords by the second day that we worked on their blogs.  If they enter in their school emails right away, kidblog.org will send them an email with their password so they do not lose their work.

2).  Have students create profile names that are unique and describe an interest of theirs.  We did not want students using their personal names in their blog screen names in the event that we open it up to the outside world in the future.  Some of these names ended up being quite creative, and it was a challenge for my team teacher and I do figure out who was  who.  We also wanted students to create logins separate from their school issued Google logins.

3).  Remind students that they are the authors of their blog, and that the title for the entry is completely up to them, and IS NECESSARY!  The catchier the title, the more likely the blog entry is going to be read. We allowed students to copy and paste the writing prompt within their draft blog as they were writing, and then asked them to delete it before publishing their entry.

4.)  Remind students to proofread and spell check their work.  We had to remind students that they are the authors of their blog and that others are going to see their work and wonder who did not take the time to edit their writing.  This is not only a reflection of them, but a reflection of their class, and their classroom teacher.

5.)  Take time to show of student blogs on the “BIG SCREEN” aka Promethean board.  Students love when their work is used as an example in class.  It works even better if students do not know who each others “pen names” (aka screen names) are.  Praise students for their great work, and offer feedback on pieces to make them better entries.  

6.)  Encourage students that their blogs are a work in progress and that they can edit at any time.  If students know that blog writing is a revolving writing-editing process, students may go back and add or edit their blog entries at any time.

7.)  Don’t introduce commenting right away.  On the first entry, I did not want to enable commenting. I wanted students to take their time and put effort into their blog entries.  We will enable commenting at a later date on future blogs.