Blogging 

So far I have mixed feelings about blogging.  I have spent the last two weeks with my French 11/12 class creating blog posts and commenting on our exchange class’ blog.  The students are disappointed that no one has commented yet.   I had heard from ETMOOC participants that commenting is the most important feature of blogging and I realize, more than ever, now that this is true.  How do we get more people to comment?  Even the comments we have sent out haven’t received any feedback.  Patience… I guess is the answer right now.  I will set up a couple of new goals for myself as a result of this reflection and situation: I will reply to more blog posts myself and will find out about ‘quad blogging’, a term I recently heard on a Classroom 2.0 blackboard collaborate session in regards to kidblog.  Are there any other things that I should be doing to get the comments rolling in for my students?

 Tweeting

On the other hand, I am loving twitter.  I have been tweeting out a question a day for my class in French and it has been a joy to read all the responses.  It makes the learning fun as we check in and review answers. The students are proud when their response gets mentioned in class and if we miss it, they are sure to remind all of us.  Another bonus that I wasn’t thinking about when I began tweeting was the feedback from the local community.  I have had local business people, parents, school trustees, and other teachers either take part in the twitter discussion already or ask me face to face if they can respond to #phssF.  The business owner said it was great to see French being used on the North Island, since there is not a large French community here. One of the students also forwarded our tweets to a previous classmate  who now lives in the States.

This week resulted in a lot of connections, thanks to twitter.  I hope more are to follow from our blogging experience too.