Blogger

Blogging  -
Repost from Chad the Teacher:  http://chadtheteacher.com/blog/3-tech-tools-for-your-class-3/

If I could recommend you take on one tool this next school year, it would be blogging! I am a HUGE fan of blogging…obviously (see Chad's Blog http://chadtheteacher.com/blog) …and I think you should too! For your classroom, blogging really can change the amount of reach you have with your students and how you interact with them.

Reach

Blogs are really cool, because kids can access them from anywhere…anytime!
Students wondering what they have to do for homework tonight? They can check your blog!
Do they need to see all the requirements for this weeks project? Guess what…it can be on your blog!
Want to share some ideas or notes that go beyond the basic lesson you covered in class? Hmm…sounds like a blog might be the answer!

Depending on what level you teach, you may have your students most of the day or just for 45 minutes, but no matter what level it is, you probably don’t get to cover al the material that you like to…or need to…in the course of time that you have those students in class. A blog allows you to reach those students after school hours to give them additional knowledge, resources, or simply remind them that your class still exists outside of the normal window of time they are used to thinking about it!

Start it Right

Here’s the key…you can’t halfway do a blog! If you aren’t committed to updating it or putting meaningful information on it, students aren’t going to check it. How do you do that? Well, start by scheduling the time that you are going to put your updates up on the web. Make sure you schedule 20 minutes each day to sit down and write 150-200 words to keep your students up to date.

Second, put some “prizes” in your post! This will help your students learn that they need to check your blog! What does this look like? It can be as simple as posting something like, “Come in with a red piece of paper tomorrow and get extra time at your favorite center.” Or “Come in with question #34 done (which I didn’t assign!), and you can get a free homework pass!” Use these “prizes” every few posts as you start the year, and it will train students to go home and check it out!

Third way to keep it going…have the KIDS do the writing! Why should you be updating your blog every day? Have a station in your room where a student sits down at a computer everyday and the post what that day’s homework is. Have them write what things you covered in class today. Is it going to be incredible writing? Probably not, but it will get better as the year goes on, and it will be a huge help in you managing your posts!

Student Projects

Blogging doesn’t just have to be for you though. It should be for your students as well! Have them create a blog for a character in the book you are reading or from the perspective of a historical figure you are reading…or a math formula! With a little bit of creativity, you can get your students to start thinking out of the box and really start to understand the concepts you’re covering in your class! One idea that I love is Blab Reports for the science classroom! If you think of blogging as a way to post notes and ideas in a central place to look back upon, it can be a very valuable tool!

The Point

My love of this tool is that it is FREE and can have a HUGE impact on your classroom. We always need more time to keep students thinking about our class or learning more and more, and having an online presense can be a huge part of that!

For tools that you can use, both Blogger and WordPress are free…and VERY easy to use!

If you have a teacher blog that you would like to show off to help us get ideas of how we can use one in our class, please share it in the comments section below.

This is something that can have a huge impact next year, so start mapping out your blog and get ready to start writing!

Here are some comments Chad got from his Blog-Post:

Comment 1:  I like the ideas. My blog basically went dormant last year. It was just too stressfull of a year (Teammate left to be a specialist at another campus, then we had a sub, then a teacher that lasted 10 days, finally a great teacher but the kids had lost so much time and trust of the situation).

I would need to figure out a way for students who don’t have access at home to earn prizes for reading the blog, because last time we did a survey 60% of our kids did not have access at home.

I’m going to be teaching 2nd grade Science/Social Studies/Writing or self contained 2nd grade next year. I had kids blog some last year, I want to do more this coming year and using blab reports is definately going to be a tool I use.

My kids bought into blogs more after I did two things. One was twitting their blog posts with the hash tag #comments4kids. After I started doing that, they recieve a good deal of very positive feed back. The class was over the moon when a post one of them wrote about a game Coach Lucky taught them got a comment from a class in Austraila. Their teacher used the information from our post to teach her kids the game. THey had a couple of questions about the rules – and my students answered.
I also used the hash tag to find blog posts that I had the students read and comment on.
The other was I started using several blogs that really interested them in the mornings as part of our warm up. The two they like the most were:

http://zachaboard.blogspot.com/ A family of four (Zach 7, Naia 1 and their parents)living on a boat on the East Coast of US

http://savannahsails.blogspot.com/ Family of 3 (Jake 6 and his parents) doing the puddle jump across the Pacific ocean – they have fantastic pictures of the islands they visit and underwater pictures of coral and fish – even sharks.

The kids would ask me if Zack’s Mom or Jake’s Mom had posted anything.

My kids asked questions via comments and they answered with very detailed answers. Zack’s mom e-mailed us great information about how they secure the boat during a huricane. That lead to a great conversation about how hurricanes work and the different forces would effect the boat.
When peer editing they started to say things like “You can’t just say blue. Remember when Jake’s Mom said the water under the boat was crystal clear and navy blue – what kind of blue is your car”

Comment 3:  I set up a blog for the first time last year. I had many positive comments from parents. I included videos of experiments and pictures throughout the school year. It was difficult to keep up with it towards the end of the school year, but I felt I did a pretty good job for my 1st time. I hope to do even more this year. I like the idea of the contest, and I like having kids create a blog for story characters. Great ideas to try next year! If you would like to check out my class blog, go to rychlikscoolcats.blogspot.com.