I teach 7th and 8th grade Family and Consumer Science. I would be using blogging as a way for students to interact and connect with others. I am hoping to use blogging in my classroom to connect students from other countries. I teach a Food and Nutrition class and I am working on integrating more topics related to foods from other countries. I would love to have students from all over the world blog about what food and nutrition is like in their country. Students would be able to learn about each other culture and traditions. I teach in a rule community and many of my students have never experienced foods from around the world. Often times we get much of the information we teach our students from books but now we have the opportunity to get information from actual people. Using blogging offers students a chance to connect with others in a safe a controlled way. I am also looking into Skyping with other students so they able to talk with other students face to face about food.
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Allison, that's a really cool application of blogging. I think if you were able to connect to other FACTS and Home Ec teachers from all over the world, you could have an awesome blog of students talking about their cultures' foods. The skype idea would also be great if you could get in touch with chefs/cooks from other countries or even ones that cook exotic cuisines.
ReplyDeleteI just read that we need to comment on a challenge you may face with the blogging so I guess I'll leave you another comment.
ReplyDeleteThe biggest challenge that you are likely to encounter is creating a network of other teachers. I don't think it will be too difficult to get other teachers from your area or even in the us, but making connections to teachers in other countries will take some networking. It is definitively possible, but making those initial connects will be the hardest part. Best of luck.
Hey Allison, your ideas for your Family and Consumer Science class sounds great! I did not think about using the Skype to network with other students. The problem that I think you may run into is that some of the places you want to connect with is their access to technology. Some may have access to the web while others may take time to connect to as sillymongoose13 pointed out. I hope you are successful in using these wonderful tools for your class though.
ReplyDeleteI really like the idea of making the classroom blog availabe to people all over the country and the world? I wonder if there is a way for teachers to be able to network in this way already? If not, I can really see this being a major breakthrough in how schooling works. I am sure that if students are not able to have conversations with people from around the world about their food and nutrition on blogs; they could use the internet for research about this topic and this post what they have learned on the blog. I am excited to see how blogging revolutionizes the possibilities of what we can do as educators.
ReplyDeletePaul W. McVey
Thank you all for your input. I am hoping to have the nutrition blog set up by the end of this week. I have taken all of the suggestions given and am putting them to good use. I have enlisted the help of the Spanish and French teacher in my building and they have given me name of other schools to contact. We will see if it works.
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