I found this student blogging project created by teacher Rebecca Sue Cauchon to be very interesting. She teaches a photography class and has set up a blog to organize students’ photographs. On her blog, she has links to (what seems to be) all of her students’ personal blogs. Each student seems able to customize their blog with photos they have taken, short bios, etc. What really impressed me was that Ms. Cauchon will post things like “Photos of the Week” and then her students look through all student submissions and comment on their favorite. It’s a great way to engage students and promote student discussion and collaboration. The teacher also makes students say why they chose their favorite photo, which is a great way for students to recognize each other for their work.
It is a common saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. I teach Statistics, and pictures and graphs are very important components of data analysis. In my own classroom, I could see myself using a variation of Ms. Cauchon’s student blogging project. For example, when we are learning about scatterplots, I could each student find an image of a “real life” current scatterplot showing the relationship between 2 quantitative variables that they find interesting. Each student could post it to a “Graph of the Week” blog and then view each others’ and comment on whose was the most interesting. There are tons of graphs with which I could do this: pie charts, histograms, bar charts, etc. This could be a nice way to get students seeing the relevance of Statistics and how it is used in real life situations. It also promotes online student communication and collaboration.
This was one of the most interesting blogs that I found as well! I started going down the rabbit hole of looking at all of the student blogs because they were so well done. Your “Graph of the Week” idea seems like a great way to get students thinking. You could even post a graph and ask them to tell you why it’s interesting. Fun!!