posts gives you the ability to monitor what appears on the blog. You can register your class as a teacher and then register each student in your class. If you teach multiple classes, you have the ability to set up different classes under your account. You can also decide who can view your blog, and who can post/comment. Each post can include text, images, video, and music. Comments are text only.
How could you start the year with Kidblog? Post an image and ask students to create a caption for it. Ask students to write on their favorite indoor activity, their pets – both real and imaginary, review a book or movie you read/saw over the summer. Or post a Math problem and have students give the answer AND how s/he figured it out. Or ask students to help with beginning of the year decisions: If you were king of the classroom, what class rule would you change and what new rule would you make? What imaginary classroom pet would you suggest, and what would you name it? Another nice classroom tradition is to have a different student each week write a post about what the class learned. Especially interesting if you have a ‘Class Photographer’ add an image each week.
recently added is info bubbles with many of the pictures, which is a question mark button that will give a little fact about that picture. Kids can learn all sorts of things – from the origin of Gatorade to shark electrical sensitivity. Set up on a couple of classroom computers as a drawing or spelling center, but take kids to a lab to make a movie or a story because they can spend a LOT of time on these projects!
Another great beginning of the school year project is to set up a classroom blog. This is something you can set up, add posts, and moderate from home or school. If you are looking for a good, basic blog to try with students, try Kidblog at
http://kidblog.org.
No student email needed to register your class, no ads, students’ blog are private by default, and the option to moderate student
One last resource I’d urge you to try is more organizational - Dropbox at
https://www.dropbox.com. If you are still using a flash drive to transfer data from school to home, you’ll definitely like using Dropbox. The free version gives you 2 GB of space on their servers to fill with your text, graphics, pdf files, music, videos, etc. Install the free software on each computer you regularly use. Type up tomorrow’s lesson and save it to the Dropbox folder on your home desktop and it will be waiting for you in the Dropbox folder on your school computer tomorrow morning. You can also easily access your files on a computer that doesn’t have Dropbox installed by logging in to www.dropbox. com. Dropbox now has a companion site called DropItToMe at
http://dropitto.me which would be perfect for using with upper el and older students. Registering with DropItToMe will give you an additional folder in your Dropbox and a unique upload address to give to students. When they upload to this address, their file will end up in the DropItToMe ‘box’. All your other files & folders will remain private. Dropbox will send you an email when a new file is uploaded (you can also turn off the upload feature when you don’t want to receive any files). So, students can turn in ‘homework’ by uploading to your DropItToMe address (max file upload size is currently 75MB) from home, school, anywhere they have Internet access.
Consider taking advantage of at least one of these great resources ‘in the cloud’. With anytime/anywhere access and secure backups of your information, you’ll have a great start this Fall!
Marilyn Western is the 2008 MACUL Teacher of the Year, a former member of the MACUL Board of Directors, a Discovery Educator Network (DEN) scholar, and a Mt. Pleasant Public Schools 5th/6th grade computer lab teacher. Outside of the classroom, she has worked as the 1998-99 MDE Technology Using Educator on Loan, a MI Champions course designer and instructor, a technology trainer for Clare Gladwin RESD, Gratiot Isabella RESD and Bay Arenac ISD, a national presenter for the Bureau of Education & Research, and a district Tech Guru. She can be reached via mwestern@
edzone.net.
MACULJOURNAL
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Fall 2011
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13
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