Blogging in the Classroom

What to do at this station

In short, blogging creates a real audience for students. They have someone other than their teacher who will be looking at their work, and they begin to take it much more serious. Blogs are a perfect place for reflection, to share ideas, and connect with people all over the world.

Here's some more info about blogging in the classroom in this Edutopia article.

• Reflection on class activities- in any subject, not just ELA!
• Daily writing or "bell work"
• Metacognition- thinking through their thinking
• Share their completed work
  • if it's a hard copy, upload a picture
• Give peer feedback

You'll want to have (ongoing) discussions about digital citizenship.

• Common Sense Media provides some great resources
• Focus on privacy/safety; what's appropriate, being supportive and encouraging instead of negative, cyberbullying; and a bit of copyright.
• Modeling constructive blog comments in class is a great idea.
• Include kids on a discussion about developing norms & expectations for their class blogs and comments they give each other.
• A handful of curated resources on my blog here.

Here are a couple of examples of letters home to parents to get their permission and get them on board with the idea.

• Example 1
• Example 2
• Here is some general information about getting parents on board and encouraging them to comment on their student's blogs.

It's always helpful to share a previous blog with parents, so they can immediately see the value. Since you don't have a class blog to share, you can share other classroom blogs to give them an idea. Below are a handful of examples:

• Kathy Cassidy's 1st Graders Class Blog (btw, her book Connected from the Start is an excellent resource- it's about her 1st graders blogging and connecting globally, but many of the ideas can be scaled up and applied K12)
• Here's an example of 3rd and 4th grade blogs.
• A 7th grade class blog
• An intervention specialists 6-8 grade students.
• Grade 8 class blog.
• 8th grade ELA class
• For more examples, look up the hashtag #commentsforkids on Twitter (you can also use this hashtag to get other educators/students to comment on your kids blogs! A few of the examples I included are from other countries... how cool would that be to have people from other countries commenting on your kids blogs!)

So, now that you've got the parents on board, where do you start?

• Edublogs is a very popular site. It uses Wordpress' platform (that's what I use for my own personal blog), but has added functionality for a teacher to oversee their students blogs. There is a free and paid version. You get a significant amount of features for the free version, and the paid version is only $40 per teacher per year.
• Another popular platform in the classroom is Kidblog. This one only gives you a free 30 days, though. After that it's $44 per year per teacher.
• You can always go with Wordpress or Blogger (Google's blogging platform), which are completely free solutions, however there will be more set up involved to link all of your student's blogs from the main class page.
• With any of these solutions, there are a number of privacy options that you can put in place. Keep in mind, while we do need to make sure it is safe, the more you lock it down, the more you may as well just stick to using a Google Doc and sharing it in class (if no one else outside the class can see the blog, what's the point?). Also, any of these solutions will have great tutorials on getting started.

Once the blog is up and running, you'll continue to have tons of ideas and ways to use the blog! Here are 50 ideas to get you started!