TJ6 Second time working on the blog

On March 16^th, students were in contact with their Kidblog for the second time. During this session in system class, they had to make a post about their welcome to their classmates on their group page. They had to write the word welcome as the title of their post, choose an image related to this word and introduce themselves in a short way. I noticed that some students easily did the activity, but others not. I took advantage of the students who finished quickly to help the other students. In this way, most of the students could do the activity.

TJ5 Students´ first contact with their kidblog

On March 9th, 801 grade students had their first contact with their Kidblog in the system class .I showed the blog to them and asked them to go to the activity "Instructions to decorate your group page". I asked them to read the instructions and do the corresponding activities. Most of the students asked me "teacher what do I have to do?” I thought that it was a behaviour that showed they are not autonomous learners. In other words, they always want the teacher to tell them what to do. I tell them many times to do the activities following the instructions. I noticed that there were some groups who quickly finished the activity and others who had problems and did not understand what they have to do. So I asked the students who had already finished the activities to help their classmates.

I observed that students enjoyed the activity of choosing an image for their avatars. Also, I noticed that students had difficulties to write their comments although the expressions were given. It means that although students had a bank of expressions to use, some of them wrote the comments incorrectly.

Another thing that I realized after this first students´ contact with the blog was that I made some comments for them to correct the mistakes they made when writing comments, but they did not take them into account and they did not correct their comments.

TJ4 Grouping students

On March 2^nd, I decided to group students according to my opinion because they made groups with their best friends and it was not well for them to work in class. I organized the groups to work in the blog leaving a very good student in English class in each group for him o her to help their classmates in the activities. This day students worked very well creating the name of their group page in the blog.

TJ3 Analysing different blogs.

On February 23^rd, in English class students analysed different kinds of blogs related to the topics they liked the most. Students located each one of the parts of the blog and talked about the topic and the design of the blog. In general, students said that they did not liked the blogs that had a lot of text, they liked the blogs that have attractive images and colours and short texts.

TJ2 Studying the parts of a blog

On February 9^th, students had an assignment in which they had to search about the parts of the blog in google. I checked homework and only 5 students did it. So, I decided to write each one of the parts of the blog on the board and with the help of the students who did homework, I clarify each one of the parts of the blog. Then, I resolved that students drew and located each one of the parts of a blog in a piece of paper.

Improving the blog

 

 

 

After talking with the teachers,I began to explore other blogs and ask some colleagues about how to improve the appearance of my blog becuase it did not look like a blog.A colleague who is doing a master program at Los Andes University in education gave me the idea to have two pages on the blog.The first one to present the activities to students and the second one for students to do the activities.Then,I started to separate the practicing page and the writing page where students will develop their writing process.In each activity, I inserted  the link of the writing page for students to carry out the writing activity.

Afterwards,I had a meeting with my research directors (Professor Nohora Bryan and Ana Maria de Samper).In this meeting I showed the changes I have made in the blog to them and they liked the new appearance of the blog.They gave me some suggestions (They told me to change the name of the Practicing page to Instructions,and to add useful language on the Writing Adventure page for students to take them into account when doing the activities.Subsequently,I decided to change the design of the blog to make it more attractive for my students since the first design was too serious and no attractive for teenagers.