Seeking blog collaborators

Hi, everyone,

I'm a social studies teacher in a small public high school in southern Indiana. I'm planning to have my four US Government classes (senior level) conduct research on the 2008 presidential campaign, using the PBS Vote 2008 Blueprint curriculum as the foundation for our work.

I have approximately 92 seniors in my classes. They are of varying ability levels, all the way from gifted and talented to special needs.

As part of our study, I'd like to have my students set up blogs discussing issues and events in the campaign, and I'd also like to consider having other students of similar grade level interact with mine in this discussion. I'm currently considering what my options are regarding setting up blogs, but I'll probably use Edublogs as my blog site. I've also set up a basic webpage using many of the resources and widgets that were included in the PBS resources. You can see the page at http://www.vcsc.k12.in.us/staff/mhutchison/election.

If anyone is interested in a possible collaboration through the fall campaign, please feel free to e-mail me at hutchisonm@vcsc.k12.in.us.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Michael Hutchison

Tags: socialstudies

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Permalink Reply by Sue Palmer on August 23, 2008 at 8:14pm

Hi Michael~ Your page is great! I teach US History in New York and plan to have my students involved in the election right off the bat when we begin after Labor Day. My students are juniors. I have not really finalized my plans yet but might be interested in something with your students. I will also pass the info along to my colleague who teaches Part, in Govt in our school. We are a small rural school outside Buffalo, New York.

I will let you know. Thanks for the great links!

Sue Palmer

www.masterymaze.com

www.akronschools.org/palmer

www.ipodeducators.ning.com

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Permalink Reply by Michael Hutchison on August 24, 2008 at 1:08pm

Hi, Sue,

I need to update the page a bit; I don't have many links directly to the candidates (such as Obama or McCain's websites), but my plan is to do so sometime next week.

A couple of quick notes...

First, are you familiar with the PBS Vote 2008 Blueprint resources (check http://www.pbs.org/teachers/vote2008/)? What I plan to do with my students will follow several of the lessons in the "Blueprint".

I find PBS materials to always be of high quality, and I think the lessons contained here will be be a great jumping off point for the kids. (Jenny Bradbury of PBS suggested I post a discussion in Classroom 2.0 to help identify teachers who might be interested in having their students blog with mine.)

We've already finished our second week of school, and I'm planning to have my kids set blogs up late next week (right before Labor Day). If you are still interested in collaborating, it should be easy for me to forward their blog URLs.

Michael H.

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Permalink Reply by Jim Brinling on March 14, 2009 at 8:24pm

Michael,

How did the blogging go? I am a social studies teacher in Northwest PA, teaching a class of seniors in a Current Events class. Like yours mixed abilty. We started blogging this week about events in the news. Most are using edublogs and some using google's blogger.

Any interest in collaborating to in finishing out the year?

Jim Brinling

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Permalink Reply by Michael Hutchison on March 16, 2009 at 6:29pm

Hi, Jim,

Sorry it took me a few days to reply. We're on spring break this week!

Thanks for your reply to this. We basically blogged internally using the PBS materials for the election campaign, and when we started second semester, my teaching assignment changed substantially. I'm now teaching two sections of 11th grade US History and three sections of 10th grade World History.

What ideas did you have about collaborating? My juniors are in the middle of studying World War II... is there something there that might work if your kids and mine collaborated?