Thursday, December 22, 2005

Little Bits of Blogging

Our student blog is underway! Pairs of students are taking turns writing a summary of our day and posting it on our class blogmeister blog.

We began last Thursday. We went into the computer lab and first we visited the Super Students Blog. It is an excellent 5th grade blog written by Ms. Sanborn's class at Willowdale Elementary. I wanted them to have good blogging role models. I don't know that in one visit my students absorbed those writers' effective strategies, but they were envious that Ms. Sanborn's class was working on a robotics unit.

Next I introduced Blogmeister. The class voted on which Blogmeister template they wanted for our blog. They chose the rainbow colored pattern with a peace sign logo. Next they helped me write the first entry. It was a bit tortuous writing it as a group, but they did help me revise it as we read back through it.

I explained to the class that we were writing for two different audiences. One audience was their classmates. If someone was absent, they could visit the blog to see what they had missed. The other audience was their parents. As I explained it to them...
None of you would ever do this, but SOME children go home and when asked by their parents what they did at school that day, they reply, "Nothing."
They clearly related to THAT experience.

Next we went back to the room and formed blogging teams. To my surprise, a number of students chose to be on a team of one, which means they will write alone on their day. To my delight, most of the children wanted to be the first to write to our blog.

Reading the first pairs' draft, I could clearly see that our first area of writing instruction needed to focus on fleshing out writing topics. Even Strunk and White would have to admit this writing was too lean. I had another student work with them to add more details.

The next day, students were approaching me on their own to ask permission to be the blog writer of the day. I hope that level of enthusiam continues.

Before our next session, I created a brainstorming template in Kidspiration, and another one in Appleworks. The children prefer the Kidspiration template, but I'm thinking it may be the most effective for the bloggers to receive a paper template that they carry with them the day they are in charge of writing the blog. They can add to it throughout the day. I'm envisioning a special blogger clipboard they could carry from class to class so that all their teachers would know they had permission to be taking notes.

It was a crazy time of year to tackle something new. We have class through Friday and the children are already giddy with Christmas excitement. However, it is proving a worthy distraction. And it was a gift to me to be blogging with children again.

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

My ID...

When I first created this blog, I wasn't sure if I could include personal information that would identify my school because I wasn't sure how the student blogs would interact with it. To protect their personal information, I didn't share mine. I was also a bit leery of giving away personal information in the blogosphere; I hadn't any real feel for the potential consequences, so I erred on the side of caution.

Eventually it became clear that the student blogs would not be linked to this blog, so I turned on my profile, because bloggers I respected kept writing about how important it was to not be anonymous.

Then about a month ago I started another Blogger blog. It is an online newsletter for the parents of our students. It represents our entire grade level, not just me, so I didn't want my profile on the page-- that made it look like it was just mine. Unfortunately, the Blogger settings seemed to be an all-or-nothing type of thing in regards to profiles.

Finally, I poked around enough inside the blog template to remark the profile out of the parent blog. I tried this before and ran into trouble. However, it seems to be working for the moment, so I'm glad to no longer be anonymous on this blog. Thank you to Doug Johnson over at at The Blue Skunk Blog for nudging me into it.