Blog-based Activity Example for MADE

From "HowToGeek.com"

I consulted a couple teachers and looked at a couple examples for this. I remember seeing a great blog assignment from Greg McCandless, who asked for some of us to comment back to his students’ posts and work; it was structured much like our initial assignment in this class, with students making individual posts on their own journals, and commenting at each other in response. Making the public available to your students and your students available to the public gives them additional points of view that you can’t offer.

Using Patrick Lemon’s upcoming Spring at Sage Seminar, “Build Your Own Computer,” I’m going to go through this activity in a purely hypothetical way, as I’m only supporting the seminar. It seems that a blog activity would be beneficial for a class like this, where the students might not know each other intimately or have any idea of their goals for the class (if any).

Though all students are participating in the seminar to build your own computer, all users have different expectations of their tools, particularly one as versatile as a computer. 

So to start off the class, it would be great to have a blogging activity where students introduce themselves and the things they’re looking for out of their computer. 

Some general categories might be:

• Productivity - Word processing, calendaring
• Graphics Editing
• Web Publishing
• Coding or Programming
• Gaming, which could be separated into various types that dictate graphic needs

After this activity we could then shake the students out into different smaller groups that have similar goals. 

These groups could continue blogging daily about what they’re needing to learn and do to meet the unique purpose(s) of their personalized computer. 

As part of the introductory lesson, the students could provide a video walk thru of the some of their common computer tasks using screen casting, showing some of the tasks, programs, and games they most like to use. Our students could also learn more about what they could be doing from their classmates with this multimedia activity.