Signing up 140 kids on Gmail & a Blogger site

After 4 trips to the computer lab I now have 95% of my students successfully signed up for a Gmail account and who have created a Blog web site. In addition they have all "Blogged" or posted comments about 3 French music videos, in which they were suppose to use "Accountable Talk". I think that maybe 10% understood or put forth the effort to defend their comments with examples from what they saw in the videos or from quotes from a part of a song, all songs were sung in French with an English translation below each line.

My ultimate goal of this assignment is for students to accomplish two things. First they will begin to use "Google Reader" and import the URL blog sites of all of their classmates. They will use this to Post their weekly French "journals" where they write about their weekends, etc. in French. Prior to using Blogger they just handed them in to me and some kids shared theirs orally with the whole class and others shared with a couple kids around them. Now, students will have the opportunity to read all of their classmates weekend journal blogs and will be asked to comment on them and ask questions in French to get more details. Therefore they will be working on improving their "storytelling techniques" and working on their writing skills, which will hopefully help improve their writing in French and English.

I have learned a lot through this process of getting "set up". Mainly that it takes a lot more time than I would have guessed, but in the long run the students are learning a lifelong skill and enjoying learning about this new technology/web 2000 tool. In addition, I think it is going to make our Monday computer lab days more interesting...once they are all on board.