Gniggolb in Our School

...I'm just trying to post this quickly so that maybe people working at the district's PBGR workshop can see some of my ideas. Oh yeah, I forgot, they won't be able to SEE this blog (at least, while they are working) because all blogs using the word "blog" are blocked!

Of course, the big presumption I am making here is that by September, we'll have figured out a way to have the students blog without using the word blog. Perhaps we could do what happened with Google in China and have kids golb instead of blog.

My other, less significant presumption is that we will be using Ecotopia, by Ernest Callenbach as our central text in our utopia-themed interdisciplinary curriculum for next year, but this plan goes with that assumption. The premise of the book is that the area of California, Oregon, and Washington have succeeded from the US and have created a utopia called Ecotopia. A reporter from the US enters Ecotopia and the book alternates between news articles and journal entries he writes on his visit. Presumably we are going to have groups of students creating their own utopias as the year progresses, so I was thinking these groups could each have their own blog for their utopia. Like the reporter in Ecotopia, the students could post reports and journal entries about their utopia--perhaps reports from science and social studies, and journal entries from English. Then, students could be required to "visit" other utopias via the utopia blogs, and leave comments for the creators of these utopias.

One other blogging, oops, gniggolb idea is to set up a class blog in addition to the utopia blogs, and have students post reports about their visits to other utopias, which would more accurately mimic what the main character does in Ecotopia.

Whichever way, I think the golb entries would be perfect scaffolding for most of the different types of things we were thinking of as a culminating project. The entries could be the basis for many different types of more formal, traditional writing. English teachers, feel free to comment. Golbs would also be an excellent way to track the research students need to do for their utopias, and for their thesis on red team (see the next post on theses). I'm really eager to see if teaching students to put in links to their sources will help them understand citations better. I just have this feeling that making that physical link and having it take the reader to the actual source will make the whole process of citations less abstract.