A great teaching technique for engaging students, supporting language develop and addressing multiple intelligences is doing a Think Pair Share activity.
It’s easy to take something that you already do and transform it into a Think-Pair-Share. Occasionally I do Think-Pair-Share-Write activities and lately we’ve been playing with it as a Think-Pair-Share-Blog. The students love Think-Pair-Share activities and it engages a wide range of learners in the discussion. It doesn’t take any additional time to make. Here’s how to do it.
Think-Pair-Share-Write
1. Show students one question. It can be from a textbook, handout or overhead.
2. Have them think about it quietly, providing adequate “wait time.” (This is often around 7 second, which can feel like eternity sometimes.)
3. Then have them pair up with someone to discuss the idea.
4. Let students share their responses with the class.
5. Students write their responses.
6. Repeat the process with another question.
Think-Pair-Share-Blog
I have one computer in the class.Before class, enter one of the questions on the class blog site. I do the exact same process as above, and have one student enter the response onto the blog.
Choosing who gets to blog:
1. Sometimes I just pick a student. Since they’ve thought about it, discussed it in pairs and heard from the class, the quality of the answer is usually fairly reliable.
2. Several students will “share” with the class and I write down their names and an abbreviated response. The class votes with their fingers on the response they prefer. One finger for the first response, 2 for the second and so on. I usually only have 2-3 students share out.
Check the video I made showing the Think-Pair-Share hand signals that the originator of the Think-Pair-Share method, Dr. Frank Lyman, uses. I actually knew Dr. Lyman when I was a student in high school county student government. He worked at the Howard County Office of Education in Maryland. 20 years later I met him again when he spoke at my master’s program at the University of Maryland at College Park. I didn’t know that he created both “Think-Pair-Share” and “wait time.” How cool is that!
My students love Think-Pair-Share activities. I’m not sure which they like more the activity or the hand signals. I know the hand signals are a big hit with them.
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January 18th, 2007
It’s one thing to set up a class blog, which by the way is quite simple. It’s a completely different thing to get traffic to your blog. (Read my post on “Starting a Class Blog” for more information on getting started.)
Subscriptions
An easy way to keep your students “posted” on important class news is to add a subscription button to your blog and require that your students subscribe. I use a free service called Feedburner. Open an account and and activate it. Click the “Publicize” tab on top, click on “Email Subscriptions” then follow the directions about cutting and pasting the box into your blog.
There are videos and additional tutorials if you click on “Blogs”. I went to “How does it work?” and watched the video about the different Feedburner features and then clicked on the link “get started.”
Subscription Options
When you get to Feedburner’s email subscription page there are two options: “subscription form code” and “subscription link code.” I did a subscription link code, which allowed me to put a button on the sidebar of my blog where people can subscribe. (See the subscription button on this blog for an example.) If you use the subscription form code, people are required to subscribe before they are allowed access to the site.
Wordpress Bloggers
For wordpress.com bloggers, once you open a Feedburner account, email button is added by clicking on “Presentation,” “Sidebar Widgets,” then drag a “Text” box from the bottom into the “Sidebar Widgets” box. Then follow the directions from Feedburner on what to type into the text box.
Email Subscription Advice
You can check your Feedburner account to see who has subscribed to your blog. Once a student subscribes they need to respond to an automatically generated response letter to confirm the subscription. Make sure you let them know that they need to activate the account. I gave them a week to subscribe to accommodate for technology problems or access issues.
Expectations Around Class Blog Posts
Every time you post a blog, your students will receive the post in their in-boxes. Set up the expectation around how to use the blog as an educational tool. I don’t require my students to read every post. I figure that since they love being on the computer and they check their email accounts regularly, that they will read some of the posts. If you need your students to regularly check the email, then state that as a requirement or expectation.
Things to Know About Comments from Blog Subscribers
Since the post is sent as an email, it doesn’t lend itself as much to students commenting. I was wondering why I kept getting emails instead of comments on the blog so I clicked on one of the blog posts and verified that there isn’t a comment button on the emails they receive.
If you want students to comment on the emailed posts, they can click on the title of the post and it’ll take them directly to the blog page where they can comment. If you want comments, let you students know how to post comments. That’s what I’ll be doing tomorrow in class. 
I also recommend that you subscribe to your own blog. It’s a good idea to see what’s being sent out and to catch if anything is buggy.
Internet Safety and Blog Comments
If your students are minors, remind them to only use their first name or their first name and the first letter of their last name. You can also have them use their first name and the period or class you teach them so it’s easier for you to keep track of who is commenting.
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December 15th, 2006
