PLN Assignment

I've been looking at blogs: One talks about using blogs and technology in the classroom.
Another talks about poetry for children, with lots of fun poem suggestions to use.
Here's one called Suite 101: Teen Fiction that is an official website for reviewing teen fiction.
This one is a middle school librarian who reviews fiction herself--it's called Reading Rants and I think it's going to be my favorite.
Last is the class Diigo group.

I have one subscription that I already decided I hate, but I don't know how to unsubscribe.
Above is a screen shot of my Google reader. Click it to enlarge.

First Assignment

My 14-year-old brother has made blogs in a few of his classes in school and enjoyed them. I once used them in a college literature class myself. I can see how they can be useful in the classroom and help students to connect quickly.
My worry with student blogging like this is that students need to be given class time in a computer lab to do this. That's fine--it gives all students an equal opportunity, even if they don't have access to it at home. However, it seems like many students, including my little brother, always are simply playing online. I guess this is fine for a technology skills class, but in my English courses I won't want my students to sacrifice learning about English in order to learn technology skills. I think a good way to do this is to have blogs be on topic to English subjects and for us to not blog too much--I could choose to do a 4 week unit with a blog rather than have them work on it for an entire semester.
On the other hand, the internet can have a lot of good classroom needs. In some of my classes we work on novels, writing classroom activities to go with each. These are posted online for everyone to borrow ideas off of.
Novelinks
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