Technology in the 8th Grade

I wanted to take the opportunity to give everyone an overview of the technical systems we are using with the girls to support learning and assessment in the 8th grade. In addition to the overall 8th grade blog, which you see here, there is a blog for each subject area that the girls use to remember assignment information, to track due dates, and to find additional resources related to their classes. As the girls have very busy lives, this allows an easy way for them to have one place to check if they are ever out sick, visiting schools, or whatever, in order to be up to date on what's happening in class. You'll find links to each of these blogs along the right side of our main blog page.

We have also asked the girls to set up their own blog to be used as a space for a running "journal" of their work across multiple classes. On the right side of each of our main class blogs, you will find a list of students and links to their school blogs. Their blog posts are often reflections on the day's classwork and provide us an invaluable window into each student's engagement with our class that day. The post themselves may be text entries, may include photos or pictures, or may be a videoblog entry. Each of their blog entries has a label at bottom indicating what subject it has been posted for.

If you peek into one of their blogs, you'll find debriefs from their weekly Mission to Mars (M2M) labs, reflections on their science cores, and screenshots of their scorecards on a world geography game we played last week. If you've ever wanted to get a glimpse of not only what's happening for all the 8th grade, but also what's happening for your daughter (because she may not be telling you!) this a great place to take a look. While this is far from all of her work, it does give some representation what she's up to.

Even as we encourage the girls to utilize and become facile with today's technological tools, we'd like to assure you that we are having the conversation and showing them how to be safe and private in the digital world. We have showed them how to enable "private" modes for their blogs and their video postings so that none of them are searchable by the general public. We have also reiterated general precautions like not using one's last name online and not representing oneself online, in word or image, in a way that would attract unwanted attention. We have reinforced that behavior online should conform to the same expectations and honor code that face-to-face behavior does at the school.

We are excited about our expanded use of these tools and have been quite pleased with the ease with which the girls have engaged with them and their rate of completion for the assignments. It appears that it has not only made things easier for us but it's fun for them, too. It's definitely a win-win. As always, if you have any questions about these tools or how we're using them, please feel free to email or call and we'd be happy to chat. Thanks.