The world just got a little smaller.  Not literally of course, but figuratively.  I just learned about quad blogging.  This is when students write and comment on blogs with partner schools throughout the world.  Each week, one class wrote a blog while the other classes commented on it.

In this particular scenario, a school in Jacksonville, FL teamed up with international schools in Thailand, Switzerland and Czechoslovakia.  Each class would take turns writing a blog and the other classes would leave comments onblooie their peers’ blogs.  Not only were the students assessed on their blog writing they were also assessed on the quality of their comments.

What the students discovered was that their writings and their comments showed tremendous growth throughout the process.

I can’t wait to bring this back to my school and share it with my colleagues.

Check out their new blog by clicking this link.

Having just participated in Stephanie Teitelbaum’s session on student blogging, I am now very intrigued about the possibility of introducing blogging to my 7th and 8th grade students. I want to be very purposeful about when to introduce this new activity, in order to maximize the learning outcomes and also make good use of the very limited time with my students.

In the fall I am planning on doing significant learning about the presidential election. I think it would be interesting for my students to get perspectives from other parts of the country. In very ‘Blue State’ Massachusetts, there is little actual campaigning – the closest our students get to a presidential candidate is when they visit New Hampshire.

I like the idea of student blogging because I think it might help support the following goals:

- motivate student writing. the novelty of blogging will intrigue some students who are turned off by ‘another essay.’

- perspective. to hear from voters in other parts of the country would be very helpful.

- I’m wondering about connecting with students in Israel. There is an election coming soon there as well.

This is my first blog post. I hope that I do well on the ‘Blogging Rubric!’

Check out their blog by clicking here.

Sari says:

Stephanie and Silvia,
Thank you so much for introducing me to to quadblogging. I am so excited to start this for my students. I have been looking for a way for my students to have international pen-pals and this is a much more meaningful, efficient, modern way to do it. I’m not sure if you know about this, but I googled quadblogging and quadblogging.com came up. This website actually finds you partner schools. What a wonderful inspiration your class is, Stephanie, and I cannot wait to take this inspiration back to my students.