The best way I can think of to support work progress and process is the use of blogs. Blogs, such as this one, are a new medium that could take the place of journal entries. Numerous elementary schools across the country have some form of free writing or journal entry where students can write freely about anything they want to. Blogs can also facilitate this kind of learning by allowing students to write on the internet freely. The best part about this kind of writing is that students can easily keep track of their work. Using different links, students can have an individual section for different types of writing. This way, more than one assignment can be done on the same platform. For example, you can have your students keep one section as journal entries and another section as how to do MLA citations. A blog allows learning to happen in a forum where students can connect to one another which leads to mutual respect. In addition, less class time is used up because typing is faster than writing. Many teachers struggle with transition time in their classrooms. A regular journal requires some sort of special notebook in a certain basket. With an offline journal, here are the steps involved:
- Students get up and walk over to the basket
- Students sift through journals to find theirs
- Students return to their seats and begin writing
- Students get up to put their journals back.
In this process, students can loose their journal entries, everyone is unorganized, and too much time is taken for transitions. Now lets look at how the class transitions with an online blog as the journal.
- Students get up and walk over to the computer
- Students log in to blog and complete their entry
- Students save their work and return to their desk
In the case of blogs, using technology to increase efficiency and production is obvious. The use of blogs as journal entries is just one way to diversify the classroom and expand work process by students.
royceherbert 