Review of Bud the Teacher's Blog

I enjoyed this blog because it had many resources and announcements, articles, and comments on those articles. I enjoyed the articles published that were from Engish Journal (which is a high school English teacher's professional magazine). Beyond these, it had some very information links that were helpful to me personally.

I, again, read much more than I have the time to respond to. And, when I have more time, I will be going back and reading even more from this blog.

I will comment on the article entitled Grading Blogs. He has three ways of grading blogs: 1) complettion; 2)quality of content based on the understood audience; and 3)based on the amount of conversation it generates, found in comments and other entries that write about your post.

I personally think we grade too much in schools. In my opinion, students of all ages need time to freely learn skills without the constant fear of grades. (I can't believe I just said that because I'm often on the other side of the debate, trying to get sluggish students to produce something appropriate during class time!) As a student new to blogging myself, I realize just mastering the medium of the computer skills is enough for me. If I worried about the quanity or quality of everything I wrote, I'd never complete anything! The perfectionist in me would be too busy deleting and rewriting everything!!! And as a working person, a graduate student who is taking other courses at the same time, and trying to maintain a family life and my sanity, I simply can only give so much time to this project. In an ideal world, we would all have unlimited time! However, reality doesn't give any of us this option!)

If students were graded on completeness- that makes sense to me-- they would experience the medium of blogging and complete their work (which is a life skill!).
The author states that if he graded this way, each blog would probably start with a short audience statement. He doesn't see this as a bad thing because kids can "get creative" with how they write that audience statement. (I agree. And the awareness of audience written to is one of the six traits of writing that are mandated by the state to be taught to students. Their state writing samples would probably get higher scores because of their new, stronger awareness of audience!! This would be a good thing becasue numerous students did not pass their writing samples. Furthermore, the non-passin students don't get a chance to show their improved writing skills on state samples for several more years. Their next chance is 8th grade; until then these students will be seen as "non-passing writers." Having been an English teacher previously, this bothers me quite a bit. I wish they got a chance to pass their writing samples much more often.)

I will finish this comment later. I need to go back and look at the information on Bud the Teacher so that I can write on who he is and what he has done in the field of education.

Be back soon to finish this review!
Kathi