I work in a primary school with students in grades K-2. So many of the great resources and ideas out there are for upper elementary, middle, and high school students. At first, I though it would not be possible for my young learners to fully incorporate blogs. I thought I would have to begin with more basic skills (i.e. having students comment on another blog).
Then I found Mrs. Wideen's Blogging Maniacs. Here, Mrs. Wideen has set up a class blog with her 1st and 2nd grade students through a resource called KidBlog. One of my students recently told me about KidBlog, so I decided to look it up myself. It's a great kid-friendly blogging tool, and best of all, it's FREE! Just looking at some of the individual posts gives the reader a great idea of how blogs are used in the classroom. There are a cluster of student posts about deserts, so I'm assuming that was a prompt students answered. However, there are other posts as well. One student posted about a bracelet she made in a rainbow loom. Another posted about something he had done in MineCraft. My favorite post, however, can be found here. This student dictated his plan to stay calm at recess, and the response was posted to his blog. While he has no comments, it can be assumed that everyone in his class has access to this post. What a great idea to get students involved in supporting this student! Now, when he has a great day at recess (which at this point is probably not the norm), students can celebrate with him and congratulate him on the use of his strategy. This is SO much more reinforcing than other strategies. The classroom teacher also has her own blog and a class twitter account. According to her blog, Mrs. Wideen is proud of having a classroom without walls, and this is evidenced by the fact that I have access to her blog and feel like I am getting to know her students.
Mrs. Wideen was mentioned in another blog post on Edutopia that I found through a google search (Introducing Social Media to Elementary Students). This post summed up many of the struggles with implementing blogging with our youngest learners. I especially liked the point the author made about "social media" in our time. She writes:
If we honestly think about it, we were all taught the "social media" of our time in early elementary school. Remember the friendly letter? How about thank you notes? Telephone etiquette? In early grades, none of us were expected to master these skills independently, but they were integrated into our curriculum so that effective social behavior could be modeled at a young age.
This is a GREAT point about social media. While few of us were actually writing letters in elementary school, we all learned how to do so. Students still learn to write friendly letters in primary grades, but what are they more likely to need to know how to do? Write a letter? Or read and write to a blog?
There's a great deal to be discussed with respect to this particular blog post. I might even continue discussing it in my next post. If you have the chance, skim through it and let me know what you think in the comments below! Got additional ideas for blogging with the little ones? Share it with a comment!
