iTeach180 Project Day 8

Today’s lesson may vary depending on what homework you assigned last night. If you assigned a blog post to your students you had the opportunity to check them over remotely. Today we will focus on the responsibility of writing and publishing online and how we can add RSS feeds to our iGoogle page.

Objectives:
Students will be able to write responsibility and effectively online
Students will be able to add an RSS feed to an iGoogle page

Process:
Today’s lesson should start be reviewing the blogging process that happened last night for homework. Have students recall any problems they encountered and how they felt when the hit the “publish post” button.

NOTE: In the past, I have used my PLN or a small group of teachers online to read and comment on my students’ posts. This task will reinforce the presence of an audience and how important and powerful writing is when you are publishing to the world.

As you present the responsibility of being an author online, you may want to incorporate a writing rubric for your blogging assignments. You can easily create your own of there are plenty of rubric online (see below). Tell students that this rubric will be used on every blog post and that students still need to proofread their work that is being published.

Blog Scoring Rubric

Another good exercise might be to find blogs that you know are ill worded or grammatical incorrect and have students rate the blogs appeal with these errors. What does it do to the bloggers credibility? Would you read this blog again?

The next phase of this lesson will be how students can access their blogs in different forums.

1. Have students return to their iGoogle page. (NOTE: You might want to do a random check in of all their iGoogle pages to see how they are using them after a week and a half of school).

2. Have them open up another tab and return to their blog home page they created yesterday. Once they have these two tabs open watch the video below. The video will show you how to add a RSS link to your iGoogle homepage.

For homework, you might want to have your students subscribe to the classroom blogs or have them select one blog that they really enjoy reading that they can add to their iGoogle page.