The Next Step » Uncategorized http://thenextstep.edublogs.org Moving Education Forward, One Step at a Time Tue, 08 Dec 2009 05:50:37 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.2 en hourly 1 Voting Forward http://thenextstep.edublogs.org/2008/10/18/voting-forward/ http://thenextstep.edublogs.org/2008/10/18/voting-forward/#comments Sat, 18 Oct 2008 21:47:35 +0000 Cory Plough http://thenextstep.edublogs.org/?p=110 Early voting began in Nevada today. I just finished casting my ballot.  When I walked out to my car, a feeling of peace rushed over my body.  Chills ran down my arms and legs.  I had to sit in my car for a minute and gather myself before I could drive home.  My eyes welled up as I sat in the parking lot gazing outward to nowhere, forward to everything.  For the first time in life, my vote will truly change the world for the better.  Wow, what an amazing time to be alive.

]]> http://thenextstep.edublogs.org/2008/10/18/voting-forward/feed/ 1 Student Voice + Google 20% http://thenextstep.edublogs.org/2008/02/11/student-voice-google-20/ http://thenextstep.edublogs.org/2008/02/11/student-voice-google-20/#comments Tue, 12 Feb 2008 03:15:00 +0000 Cory Plough http://thenextstep.edublogs.org/2008/02/11/student-voice-google-20/ Konrad Glogowski presented at EduCon2.0 about using blogs with students. At the beginning of his presentation I was thinking, “well, I already use blogs with my students so not sure if this is going to be useful.” I kept my ears open and pretty soon heard something that I’ve thought about everyday since. One of his main themes was losing your teacher voice and giving the students one. He described how important it was to let students establish the confidence to write online knowing that it could be read by other students. The way he made this happen was by allowing students to write about nonacademic topics for a little while. He would then have a conversation with them through comments. He threw away that teacher tone for the rest of the year. No more looking at writing through the eyes of someone grading it on grammar and punctuation. Talk to your kids about what they are writing, listen to their voice.

Google allows its employees to spend 20% of their time (one day/wk) working on a project outside their job requirements. I’ve thought a lot about how to apply this to my courses and it wasn’t until this week that a light bulb went on and I settled on something. Why not combine Konrad’s idea of student voice with Google 20%? Here is what I came up with.

I will encourage students to earn 20% of their points for the week just writing in their blog. For example (a rough estimate), if they have a 100 point project due that week, 20 points will come from their blog and can be applied as extra credit or as a substitute for some of the project requirements. (logistics will fall into place a little later). There will have to be a couple caveats though:
1. Early on in the process they can write about anything on their mind.
2. The students must only write things they are willing to share with other students.
3. As the semester progresses, the blogs will start to incorporate more and more ideas from our content.

Any suggestions? Arguments?

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