On-Line Student Book Clubs via Blogging

During my first year of having a classroom blog, I constantly have a working to-do list of what I would like to incorporate. Recently I was able to try out one of them by having my first ever on-line student book club, and I am very excited with the results. Rather than reading a section on their own and then meeting to discuss in class, students got their first taste of an on-line discussion while reading Bella at Midnight by Diane Stanley. I decided to only try it out with one group so that I would be able to work out any necessary gliches before trying to implement it with multiple groups at a time. However, another first was being able to have students from both 6th and 7th grade participate.

Overall the group went really smoothly, and my students enjoyed the process. In addition, parents enjoyed being able to follow the discussion as some read the book along with their children. I jotted down some notes of what I would need to do in order to make them even more successful in the future.

*During the discussion I realized how to set up the nested comments which facilitated easier discussion for our last conversation as opposed to the first two weeks. This will always be the standard from now on.

*I need to remind students from the beginning of the expectation to maintain an academic voice. At times their writing was a little too casual (using slang) or not double checking to make sure they followed certain conventions such as capitals.

*This time students were required to do their original post plus respond to three other people. Next time I will probably still have that requirement, but I will also add that they are expected to read every comment and respond to anyone who directly asks them a question, even if they have already met their required amount of posts.

*I will also start to scaffold and encourage them to reference the book, including a page reference so that they will start to get used to scholarly references and explanations of an idea. I modeled this a little bit with this discussion but I did not explicitly point this out to students and talk about why it is beneficial to do this. This will also probably vary book to book, depending on the difficulty level of the text.

*I have also considered the possibilities of joining up with other classrooms to have book discussions. Just as having an on-line book discussion allowed me to have students from both of the grade levels I teach, it will also open up the possibilities for discussing with other students. This would be a great experience for my students to see different perspectives. I hope to try this out sometime later this year.

*Along the same lines, it has also entered my mind that this format would allow for more parent involvement and potentially another means for university students to interact with reading buddies, a classroom project that they have.

*Later this year I will be starting student blogs (I am still deciding with exactly how many students). One of the options will be for students to start their own book discussions. They will be able to use the ones that I lead with them as a springboard for how they might choose to format theirs.

The possibilities are endless, and I am excited to see the blogging discoveries this year will bring!