Here is the Astronomy Journal I used with this blog.
I was really excited at the opportunity to create a blog to use in my practicum. Before this, I have never created a blog before. As I really enjoy figuring out technology, this was a fun challenge to undertake. It took me a few hours to simply fiddle around with the different options and tools that were available. I think this is the most important step to creating a blog because there are so many different tools that it makes it easier to later add posts and pages later on. I originally created a blog on the Edublogs.org website which uses the WordPress platform. However, after I spent hours creating my blog, the Edublogs website crashed and was inaccessible for over a week. This happened just before my practicum started. I then had to re-create my blog on a new site. I chose wordpress.com because I already knew how to use all of the tools. This saved me lots of time as I only had to add the information and not have to learn a whole new platform.
One thing with WordPress that I am not happy with is the page ordering. It is all manual, so if you number something as 6 and then you want to change it to be page 2, you then have to go and change all of the numbers accordingly from the original numbers 2-6. This can be very time consuming. That is my only complaint with using WordPress at this point in time.
The students were really enthusiastic to get to use the blog. The first day, I had the students just type in the URL and then search through the blog and I taught them how to make a comment. They really liked being able to make a comment and then get to read what their classmates wrote. On the second day, we studied our first planet. This is not go over very well because I had all information in paragraph form. I quickly discovered students in grade three do not have the skills to read for information. So, that evening I added a fact sheet at the bottom of each of the planet pages for a quick reference for the students. We would read through the information in the paragraphs and then they would continue on their own filling in the blanks on their worksheet. They were to then draw and colour the planet. The students were on task and really enjoyed learning about the planets. When students were finished, they were allowed to look at the solar system websites and play some of the games on the Nasa Website. This was also a great motivator for those who students who do not necessarily like printing.
The Youtube video was a great addition to my blog. It was a wonderful way for the students to understand just how much bigger the Sun is than the Earth. However, as they all wanted to play it, there is music and it was distracting so I removed it from the blog after that one lesson. But that is the beauty of blogs because you can have information on the blog but you can choose when it is visible to the students.
I would like to make the blog a little more interactive for the students. I am not sure how I would do this but it is a future goal. I also did not get to really use the other pages (Sun, comets, and asteroids) to their full potential which is why they are still very wordy. I would also have GoogleEarth on every computer for my students because within it there is a GoogleSpace function for the students to look at the planets in relation to each other. I would want to link that through my blog or tie it in one way or another. There are endless possibilities depending on the time I put in to researching what is out there. One thing I might look into would be another solar system blog or class blog and coordinate with that teacher to have students comment on the other blog about what they learned about the solar system and vice versa. These are just a few ideas.
I think that as a teacher with my own classroom, I would have my own classroom blog as well as subject blogs depending on the grade and what they are learning about. I think the solar system is a good one for the blog because it is such an abstract concept for students.
I had a lot of fun implementing this blog and I can’t wait for the opportunity to do this again!
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