Plans for Blogging and Maintaining Wiki Pages for Now and Next Year

As a reminder to myself, I copied the open feedback portion of my progress report. I want to encourage myself to be sure to encourage my students to blog and maintain their team wiki pages!!

Open Feedback from March 31st Progress Report:
As a first year participant in the Globaloria program, I have faced many challenges in learning all the in’s and out’s. When I first was introduced to the wiki pages and blogs, I felt that they would be a really good classroom tool. As I have used them over this past year, I have found them to be so. However, it seems that this is a tool that I don’t use frequently enough. I myself am so busy with day-to-day details of teaching my own class in addition to trying to teach this brand new class as well as learn “how” to teach this class that I feel I neglect this portion of the program. This in turn leads my students to neglect it. This is not a conscious thing, but it happens. We all get so wound up in our gaming process that I forget to have them blog. So, I am going to use the forms that Maitreyi emailed to us for our last WebEx session to let my students see what they need to be doing and what their final evaluations will be based upon. I am going to give them a copy each week to keep in the class folders and have them check off each item that they are to complete and then review it on Fridays to make sure that they have done their weekly assignments. I think that with this new organizational tool that has been developed for us that I will do a better job of “recordkeeping” and hopefully this will lead them to be more responsible for updating their blogs and not relying on me to remind them. I also will have Loretta double check their blog entries to be sure they have posted and if not, remind them to do so. I plan to have them blog at least twice a week – once in class and once on their own time – until the end of the year. I want to try this to see how it works and then hopefully next year, this will be a common practice in the class for my students and myself.