I have found this experience of participating in an online community both interesting and informative. Over the past eight weeks, I have learned a great deal about digital citizenship and how important it is to demonstrate positive digital citizenship online. I thoroughly enjoyed participating in a community concerning literature. I spent a large amount of time reading posts in this forum made by fellow teachers. It was interesting to observe how teachers responded to one another, especially veteran teachers. I found that in the education portion of the literature forum, negative digital citizenship was often being displayed by veteran teachers, who appeared to think they knew much more about a given topic than naive young teachers. This is something that I will definitely be aware of in future years as I become a veteran teacher. That being said, I very much enjoyed this assignment and the time I was able to spend learning and discussing literature and strategies for teaching literature. This is a forum that I plan to stay connected with as I have found it to be a wonderful resource for my study and teaching of literature.
In addition to observing the digital citizenship in a forum of my choosing, I enjoyed keeping a weekly blog. I have always wanted to keep a blog, but I haven't ever found the time to actually do it. Being required to blog on a weekly basis allowed me to prove to myself that I can make the time to sit down and write about a specific topic if I put my mid to it. I think blogging is something that is appealing to me because I enjoy writing and I think that writing about something that is particularly interesting to a person can be extremely beneficial. I definitely want to try to incorporate blogging into my English curriculum in the future. Currently, my students write in journals multiple times a week, but I think blogging would be a powerful experience for them and enable us to engage in productive dialogue conceding digital citizenship.
Thanks for reading my blog!
Katie- It's good to hear that you had a positive experience through this assignment. I feel I did too. Not knowing much about Literature, I feel that by reading your blog I was educated enough to find an interest in it as well. That's a good idea to include blogging into your English curriculum. Your students would most definitely enjoy it.
ReplyDeleteI'm right there with you Katie. I think the blog was an awesome idea and I think would be particularly valuable if we could figure out a way to appropriately have our students blog. Especially because I teach online it would probably make more sense than for a traditional classroom, but it could work there as well.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree with you, I think this assignment has opened up my eyes to the world of forums and blogging. Like you, it has made me aware of the different kinds of communities that are out there online. It seems in your case that the veteran teachers were the ones who were more opinionated in negative ways and I think it is so cool that you realize that you never want to be like some of those negative posters. Always making sure you keep you mind and heart open to opinions and ideas is extremely important as a new teacher. I think at the upper grade level, like the classes you teach, allowing students to blog or explore online forums would be a great way for them to understand the content as well as identify the proper ways to act online. I have really enjoyed reading your blog about everything you have found in the past nine weeks.
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