I hope everyone is having a nice summer. I am inviting you to join me in making a chemistry site that is engaging to teenagers. I have found that the honors students are using Blackboard regularly but the ChemI students are not. How do we reach them? In my summer reading the following quote stands out in my mind as I consider options; "A person is likely to be more receptive to change on novel beliefs, attitudes or activities." (Ryan 2000) So, in order to change the ChemI student behavior of not using their class site, we need to make the site different and engaging with novel activities. As I come up with lesson plan ideas and experiment with the interface, I would appreciate any feedback you may have. Just a quick safety note to students: Please do not use your first and last name on your posts.
Ryan, A. M. (2000). Peer groups as a context for the socialization of adolescents’ motivation, engagement, and achievement in school. Educational Psychologist, 35, 101-111.
2 comments:
Carla:
Your idea is very good, and I think many teenagers will find bloging appealing to them. My fear is they have little ability to make a connection between a real life experience and academic material, whithout good models and guidence.
I'm thinking to introduce blog in my everyday practice, but more specific to the lab activities. My idea is to give students specific questions to answer prior to a lab activity, and to discuss their answers before starting the lab. This will be a pre-lab discussion online. I try to avoid as much as possible directive labs and to turn more towards inquiry labs.This is because you know how much I'm committed to help students to understand how to think in science using experiments.
Yes, I am going to use the Blog function in Blackboard.com to do prelab and some postlab discussions. But, I would also like to go beyond Blackboard, because my tracking shows me they are not using it. But, I see teens readily making their own Blogs about issues they are concerned about, so I thought they might visit a site if it were from Google and not their school's Blackboard site. (I am talking about regular students. Honors kids can be relied on to check and use Blackboard regularly.
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