Blogging in Elementary School Classrooms
Editor’s Note: Blogging with elementary school students can present its own unique challenges. Therefore, I invited elementary school teacher and former district technology specialist, Lee Kolbert to share her knowledge on the topic.
Blogging with elementary students can be an extremely rewarding experience.
With their own blogs, students can have a place for publishing their own writing; creating authentic learning spaces where every child can contribute and engage in conversations that point back to his or her original post. Just imagine how powerful that can make a child feel, to have others contributing to HIS/HER conversation! Yes, even small children can do this.
In my experience, the most successful elementary student blogs begin with a
single class blog (
http://weblogs.pbspaces.com/mrskolbert/) which contains posts by the teacher or “guest posts” by the students. With the target audience being the students and their parents, the teacher typically writes brief, relevant posts that appeal to her audience. In my class, I tell my students’ parents that everything Internet-related is a shared experience; whether it be from school or home. So, if students are reading or commenting on my class blog from home, I will assume they are with their parents or are doing it with the permission of their parents. I believe this shows parents that I respect their judgment and boundaries. It also allows them to feel comfortable in their knowledge of what their children are doing online per my directions.
Highlighting classroom activities, providing additional curricula resources, pushing parents’ thinking, showcasing students’ work and modeling and sharing best practices for blogging are all excellent fodder for class blogs. By sharing in the collective enthusiasm of the class blog as work is published and comments are received, students share the excitement together and will begin to brainstorm ideas for when they finally have their own spaces. One of the best blogging lessons I did early this year was on commenting. I used a paper blog commenting activity that was shared with me by good friend, Karen McMillan. Students create paper blogs and comment on them using sticky notes. Since almost all blogs require something in the email field when leaving comments, this gave my students lots of practice using my non-flexible directives. This is that no last names or personal information is revealed and that all email addresses would be
firstname@example.com. Just as 555- is a fictitious phone number prefix used in television and movies, @
example.com is a fictitious domain.
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