Blogging

Post date: Feb 20, 2017 1:40:35 AM

What's the purpose of our blogs?

Class blogs - to engage with our community. To get them involved and make them aware of what is happening at school and in their child's classroom. The key here is regular meaningful posts. If we post infrequently we'll lose our audience and if we blog every day then we risk overloading them. Be purposeful and plan what you are posting to maximise your impact.

Student blogs - to allow student to document their learning over their time at St Mary's in a way that is up to date and online so it can be shared and viewed by a much larger audience. These blogs are not meant to be perfect but students should be made aware that they are posting online for a real audience. These blogs are a great tool for teaching digital awareness as well. I have linked a list of student blogs in R4 onto our class blog so everyone can access them easily. See here. I used this as a bit of an alphabetical ordering exercise too - just shared a blank table and told the class to make their list alphabetical.

For teachers of year 3-6 students have you set up a class folder for photos yet? Simply set up a folder eg.g R4 photos 2017. Then save class photos into the sub-folders you make. Share it with your class so they can read only and then they have access to all the photos. You can also share the school wide photos for the year with your class. Make sure it is Read only. By sharing photos with your class you'll always have photos that the students can relate to and write about from personal experience. This also makes reflections on blogs easier.

Junior teachers - Continue adding lots of photos to your class blog and use them for oral and written language learning. If you need help setting up Easyblogger please let me know, our Tech team would love to come an help you and your students.

Want to jazz up your class blog a bit? Come to the meeting room at lunchtime on Monday next week and I'll show you how to change the layout, add gadgets and a few other minor improvements.

Here are a few ideas/tools that have come through my online spots lately.

Pobble365 A new pic each day to inspire some creative writing (Thanks Tai).

Once upon a time Images to inspire

Scholastic story starters This site is like a lucky dip in that you spin the wheels to get the writing ideas. Mostly online (Take a screenshot to keep a copy after you've finished).

Daily Teaching Tools Simply a list of ideas for writing.

The Te Reo Maori Classroom - Lots of freebies, resources and ideas.

This also came through the teachers Facebook page.