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ALC

                                    

I'm teaching an ALC (area learning center?) class after school.  When I came up with the idea for this eighth grade program (reading and writing using Blogger and Feedly), I was proud of my idea.  Actually, I'm sure I blogged about it.  This week is the second week of the program, and I think it's going to be successful.  Unfortunately, it's not perfect.  First, I've never taught eighth grade (7th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th... never 8th).  Second, the girls have not been registering for the program although the boys have (I only have one girl).  Finally, I didn't expect eighth grade boys to need at least ten minutes with snacks and conversation before they were ready to concentrate.  It makes sense, but I wasn't prepared.  At least I know what we're doing is interesting.  They've started their Blogger pages and added news feeds (five categories at least 30 feeds) to their Feedly account, and have started looking at articles.  Tonight they read and blogged about their first article.  It's fun to see the variety of articles being read in the same room.  One student (remember they're all struggling readers) even used the word inference today as he was writing his post.  If I can keep given them a variety of idea for posts, this will be awesome.  To add to my positive feelings about this idea, one of the eighth grade language arts teachers came in today as I was handing out snacks to the eighth grade boys.  She wanted to tell me that she had heard positive comments about the program, "We get to choose the articles we read.  We can read about anything we want.  And we get to blog about it."  Yay!  Of course, she also wants to come in and observe (make sure good stuff is actually happening?) the process.  Yep, she can come in and observe if she takes the first ten minutes of calming them down and handing out snacks.

Comments

LH said…
I love this project.
1:58 AM
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