Hi friends! I have a treat for you today. My very intelligent and dedicated co-worker Katie McEnaney is guest posting for Art is Basic today. She was previously our 3rd grade Language Arts/Social Studies/Drama teacher and this year she moved to the 6th/7th grade level. She also created the blog The Logonauts, which focuses on a variety of literature related topics.
Many readers have asked me for advice about blogging with students. Since my time is so limited with my students, I want to use as much time as possible with hands-on art making and therefore I have not tried blogging with students. I knew that Katie has blogged with her classes, so I asked her to share her experiences. At the high school or middle school setting, you may have more time. Maybe you are a classroom teacher and would like to try blogging with students. If so, the following post will give you a place to start. Here is Katie’s post:
Authentic writing means writing with an actual purpose and for an actual audience. Blogging with students is a powerful way to give your students an authentic writing experience. You will be amazed at how motivating it is when students can share real writing and receive comments and feedback from others.
Blogging with Students: Decisions
The first thing to consider when deciding to blog with students is who will be your target audience. Are you looking for kids to share their work with just their family? With other classes? With the broader public? The second consideration, driven by the first, is which blogging platform to use.
If you teach older students and are interested in having them share their work publicly on the internet, then you can consider using the same blogging platforms utilized by adult bloggers. Blogger or Google Sites are available to anyone with a Google email address and are commonly used by schools that use Google for their school email client.
If you want more control over who can see and interact with your students’ work, then I recommend using an educational blogging platform. There are some free platforms, while others charge modest annual fees for a teacher account.
I have used Kidblog for several years with both third and seventh grade students. A teacher account allows you to add up to 200 students and to control privacy options for your class and for individual posts. Student posts can be made visible only to the teacher, only to their classmates (and invited parents), only to selected Kidblog classrooms, or totally public. You also have teacher oversight over all posts and comments, which must be “approved” by the teacher account before they become visible to others.
If you are blogging with very young students, a platform like Seesaw is customizable enough to allow even non-writers to share posts and pictures. Our kindergarten teacher uses Seesaw to have kids communicate their learning with their families through easily-accessible digital portfolios.
Especially if you are just starting out with student blogging, I recommend choosing an educational blogging platform, like Kidblog, Seesaw, or others. They are usually more user-friendly and allow you to more easily monitor student posts.
Blogging with Students: Parent and Administrative Support
The final hurdle before blogging with students is to make sure you have the support of your families and administration. Consider carefully how you will protect student privacy and address potential concerns. Some basics: have students use only their first names (or pseudonyms), do not publicize the name of your school, and use privacy controls that match the age and maturity of your students.
I introduce student blogging during our Back to School Night at the beginning of the year, and I pass out a parental permission slip that covers blogging as well as other technologies we might use during the school year. You can find some great examples of such permissions slips here: https://pernillesripp.com/writing/student-blogging/internet-safety/ . In several years of blogging with students, I have not had any parents opt their children out of participating, though I have had a few shy kids who didn’t want to share their posts outside the classroom. (They usually came around once everyone else started receiving positive comments.)
Blogging with Students: Endless Possibilities
Blogging with students brings the world outside of your classroom in. My students have written pen pal style posts to a partner classroom in Spain, shared poems and poetry analysis with students in Malaysia, and written book recommendations that have been shared publically on my teaching blog (http://www.thelogonauts.com/search/label/3rdfor3rd .
Curious about how to introduce blogging to your students? Check out this post (http://www.thelogonauts.com/2014/10/student-blogging.html) for how to use “paper blogs” to teach the basics.
In the process they also all learned a lot more about each other and became better cheerleaders and critique-ers of their own work and the work of their classmates. “Is this good enough to post?” became an important reflection question that often resulted in additional editing or revising. And while the competition for comments may have driven some topic selection (“Fine, maybe I’ll also write a review of a Minecraft book!”), even adult bloggers can find our topics driven by the allure of more clicks and comments!
Blogging with kids is an engaging and exciting way to make learning relevant and visible, share progress with parents, and encourage writers to produce quality work for others.
How could student blogging change your classroom?
Katie @ The Logonauts
Teacher and blogger at The Logonauts , http://www.thelogonauts.com/
Katie is in her ninth year of teaching but her first year of embracing the unique challenges of middle school. She is a life-long reader and enjoys ensnaring others in the web of life-long reading and writing. As a traveler, photographer, and former archaeologist, she has visited five continents, numerous countries, and 41 of the 50 US States. She loves introducing her students to the wider world and fostering their excitement about other countries and cultures.
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