>Grade 9 Bloggers

>A grade 9 Teacher/VP in my school division has truly found the power the of blogging in her class: Comfun9 Class Blog
Here is an excerpt from a recent email she sent me.
“We have developed our class blogging rubric. This was a neat process. Initially I was just giving them a check mark for submitting. It quickly became quite evident there were different levels of bloggers, and therefore some students deserving of better marks for higher quality blogging. Check out the last two day’s posts. My Day 1 kids caught Day 2 kids copying and pasting (which I had all ready picked up on, but wanted to post them and see what they noticed – another way to get them to read what each other is writing). You will see in their posts, some were quite disgusted that another student would “steal” their work. I put the idea in their head, that perhaps that should be part of the rubric, if one plagiarized work (from another student or internet publisher) – automatic 0!!! Hence, checkout the end product of the rubric.”
What better way to teach students about plagiarism then having them experience it first hand among amidst their peers. You can talk all you want to students about ‘netiquette skills’ but there is no substitute for having students engage in it themselves.