Laptops and Abdullah's Blog

We have laptops for the students here at AE and I identified with a statement from the article when she said, "My classroom, supposedly a zone for deep analysis and honest commentary, had become a mini police state, with me as the chief of police" p. 3. Several weeks ago, when I had my students type up their plant reports, we had several students playing around with a new program we didn't have on last years laptops: iphoto. They were also going into the web to look for cartoons to watch. Luckily though, we only use the computers for Word processing (so far) for an hour at a time because the other classes need them also. When I read this article I thought, "So lucky!" If we had laptops for all the students at AE, I would love it only because we would use them to look up stuff on the web and to write up our reports. Having to share our computers here is tough because with much use, they get dirty and we can't use them whenever and as much as we'd like. I can see the problems that McFarlane would have to use them a lot. I just how lucky we are not to have to use them as much as it seems they do in this school.

Abdullah's Blogging: A Generation 1.5 Student Enters The Blogosphere
What I liked about this article was the argument from Graff (1989) and using blogging as a way to communicate and look at critical literacy. If I were to use blogging in my classroom, I think I would get a lot out of how a group of kids think. I liked how grammar and spelling were not a concern and how using the oral base of their language was brought to life when talking about plagiarism. I can understand why Sabine has us each blog our ideas down, but it would be interesting to see how it look if one person were to blog a comment and we were to expound, agree/disagree upon it like we do if we were sitting in a class (and we all know that our class was not shy to do it last summer). I learned so much when we were together to talk about our articles. I know that we had some tense moments, but we learned and grew from them, as well as when we came together to agree on certain ideas. I think some of our blogs should be this way, where we all have one page and we comment to each other. I know that we do this on the phone, but without eye contact it's easy just to not say anything.
Another cool idea that was brought up with the article had to do with identifying writing as "academic" vs. "personal essays and reviews of books". We do a lot of the latter probably because we are an "oral" bunch. Now I'm thinking to teach my grade 4 students to credit where they get info (either off the web or from books) when they do their animal reports in several weeks or so to do more of an "academic" paper...hmmm.