Comment challenge Day 1
Day 1 A self audit
As a teacher who moderates the posts and comments of my class and students’ blogs, I try to comment on at least one of them every day whether it is to improve the post or about the post itself. I certainly need to get back to my personal blog and write more posts. I try every week to write back to those people who have commented recently on my posts.
I’ve never thought about tracking my comments, but after reading the Edublogger about the importance of feeds and co.mments and cocomment, I now have installed both of them. I am going to be recommending that my students keep a record of their comments using an Excel spreadsheet with date, URL and comment made in the first three columns.
I do tend to comment on the same blogs each week, but again I read the Edublogger every week and try to visit the blogs of people who have posted comments. This allows me to vary the type of blog I have commented on. But like many people, often I just read and don’t always comment.
Looking at Gina’s tips, I usually stay on topic but as Sue Waters knows, I tend to ask lots of questions about the topic when I comment. As a newbie to blogging, I need lots of answers. I am certainly owning my own comments and love having the avatar, mainly to use as an example with the students. I am not knowledgable about the topics and am still unsure how to hyperlink within a comment. I never learnt HTML at school as we programmed using punch cards and ticker tape - wow that shows my age now.
As I’ve said before your strategy of tracking back to the blogs of people who wrote comments on posts is an excellent way of varying your blog reading. Not sure if you are subscribing to the comment feed from the Edublogger using Google Reader but that may make your task easier.
I liked Gail’s tips but quite a few of them I don’t totally agree with. Take for example stay on topic. I really like the way you ask questions — to me it means your thinking about the information and wanting to know more. Also the questions help me with my learning because I go good question I hadn’t thought of that one and what is the answer. So my vote is for the questions.
If you refer to this post written by Vicki Davis it will help you with the hyperlinking.
Sue, I like the idea of encouraging students to track their comments. While I have never previously considered monitoring my own commenting, I do intend to use commenting on each other’s blogs as a requirement for my students. I am hoping it will encourage their understanding of how to provide constructive critique, and to develop a sense of community.
Hi there, great to read your post. I have been blogging for about 9 months and have learned a lot because of my comments, questions and the responses that have come back to me from people like Sue Waters. You will pick things up as you go along. best wishes Sarah
[...] the third most recent one more interesting– her work with wikis in the classroom. (It was Ms. W, by the way.) I found myself being super conscious of the comment I was leaving. I read the [...]
Miss W., thank you for visiting me; the idea of a language converter is great; first I will bring some of my students and help them post some messages to yours, as they have studied English all this year; I think it will be good for them to “plunge” into English language, because it is “the language of the web” and different languages shouldn’t dress up between different cultures as barriers; if they engage in a more deep conversation, then the language converter would be a wonderful help.