Blogging is a terrific tool for teaching and learning. As a writing teacher my first year, I tried to get my students to understand that writing is a way to process our ideas and thinking. It's a way to share our ideas with others and publish our work. I was blogging back in college; I started a style blog from my dorm room sophomore year and also was required to create a post for a class blog for a course I took my junior year each week, as well as respond to other students' posts. A lot of teachers are already blogging with their students, and I took full advantage of it my first year teaching. If you work with younger students, it's a bit harder to create a blog but it's perfect for upper elementary and secondary students. You may be asking, how do I begin blogging with my students? Let me tell you.
In my sixth grade class, all students had school email addresses through Gmail, as did I. Blogger was what I was already incredibly familiar with so I chose it for our blogging platform. There are also apps that are perfect for younger elementary students. I created two class blogs the first nine weeks--one for my 1st, 2nd and 3rd period classes and one for my 4th and 5th period classes. I did this because Blogger has a limit for how many people can contribute to a blog. After creating my blog, I sent email invitations to my students asking them to contribute to our blog. None of my students had really blogged before, so I didn't require them to use it right away. I modeled how to use it and then let students use it as they wanted to get used to this new writing platform. I wanted them to see that writing is not just words they put down on paper,. Students were still writing in their journal twenty minutes a week, but had the option to respond to blog posts and post on the blog. Many of my students became very engaged in blogging. I also set up the blog so that student posts and responses went straight to my email. That way, I could monitor not only the appropriate-ness of blog posts but also quality.
In the second semester, I had all my students become more involved in blogging and made it a weekly requirement. I decreased the amount of out-of-class journal writing from twenty minutes to 10 minutes and during the fourth quarter, I made students respond to a weekly teacher blog posts. I had a lot of fun coming up with creative blog post subjects and my students loved it. I had them do a couple of in-class assignments with our blogs first. They wrote haikus and published them on the blog. I also found some stories online that they could listen to, so I posted about five story links on the blog. In class, they had to choose one, listen to the story and then write a response in the comments section of the post. From there, students had a weekly blog post to respond to. I posted the topic on Friday after school and then they had until the following Friday to submit their response. Since I had all posts being sent to my email, I was easily able to check off when students completed the post. I printed out class rosters from Texas Gradebook and kept them in my lesson plan binder for easy access and tracking. Each week, they accumulated 10 points for responding to the blog posts. Late posts, if they forgot a week, were given 5-9 points depending on the amount of time that had passed. Students who posted quality responses on time all 10 weeks received a 100 as a blogging grade for that nine weeks. A few of my students did not respond at all during the course of our blogging project. By giving students a week to respond to the post, they could do it when they had the time (if they had extracurriculars or lots of math homework that night) and often asked if they could respond to the weekly post after finishing in-class work.
Blogging has so many uses in a classroom. You can use it as a way to showcase student work. I published my students Pic Collage haikus and Thinglink research projects on the blog. You can use it as a way of creating a writing community by having students create posts and respond to others. After being exposed to blogging for the first time, many of my students loved it and I found them creating their own posts on our class blogs. I encourage blogging in classrooms and I definitely hope to continue this.
Be a Blogger.
-Elle
In my sixth grade class, all students had school email addresses through Gmail, as did I. Blogger was what I was already incredibly familiar with so I chose it for our blogging platform. There are also apps that are perfect for younger elementary students. I created two class blogs the first nine weeks--one for my 1st, 2nd and 3rd period classes and one for my 4th and 5th period classes. I did this because Blogger has a limit for how many people can contribute to a blog. After creating my blog, I sent email invitations to my students asking them to contribute to our blog. None of my students had really blogged before, so I didn't require them to use it right away. I modeled how to use it and then let students use it as they wanted to get used to this new writing platform. I wanted them to see that writing is not just words they put down on paper,. Students were still writing in their journal twenty minutes a week, but had the option to respond to blog posts and post on the blog. Many of my students became very engaged in blogging. I also set up the blog so that student posts and responses went straight to my email. That way, I could monitor not only the appropriate-ness of blog posts but also quality.
In the second semester, I had all my students become more involved in blogging and made it a weekly requirement. I decreased the amount of out-of-class journal writing from twenty minutes to 10 minutes and during the fourth quarter, I made students respond to a weekly teacher blog posts. I had a lot of fun coming up with creative blog post subjects and my students loved it. I had them do a couple of in-class assignments with our blogs first. They wrote haikus and published them on the blog. I also found some stories online that they could listen to, so I posted about five story links on the blog. In class, they had to choose one, listen to the story and then write a response in the comments section of the post. From there, students had a weekly blog post to respond to. I posted the topic on Friday after school and then they had until the following Friday to submit their response. Since I had all posts being sent to my email, I was easily able to check off when students completed the post. I printed out class rosters from Texas Gradebook and kept them in my lesson plan binder for easy access and tracking. Each week, they accumulated 10 points for responding to the blog posts. Late posts, if they forgot a week, were given 5-9 points depending on the amount of time that had passed. Students who posted quality responses on time all 10 weeks received a 100 as a blogging grade for that nine weeks. A few of my students did not respond at all during the course of our blogging project. By giving students a week to respond to the post, they could do it when they had the time (if they had extracurriculars or lots of math homework that night) and often asked if they could respond to the weekly post after finishing in-class work.
Blogging has so many uses in a classroom. You can use it as a way to showcase student work. I published my students Pic Collage haikus and Thinglink research projects on the blog. You can use it as a way of creating a writing community by having students create posts and respond to others. After being exposed to blogging for the first time, many of my students loved it and I found them creating their own posts on our class blogs. I encourage blogging in classrooms and I definitely hope to continue this.
Be a Blogger.
-Elle
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