As part of my technology plans for the 2009-2010 s.y., I would like to start BLOGGING for the elementary students. Starting small is always a good idea. Starting perhaps with just one elementary teacher/class would make it simpler.

I would like to get ideas from teachers/tech coord./tech curriculum coord., etc. as to what would be the best way to go. I do have a few questions:

1. Which blogging platform would you recommend? Blogger? WordPress? EduBlogs?

2. Do you provide the students with their own email? Which email service?

3. How do the school administrator's feel about teacher blogging for the class? Need approval for postings from school administrator? Should there be a "disclaimer" on the teacher's blog site? Example "Opinions reflect the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of school."
But what if the school website's is link to the teacher's blog?

These are just random thoughts that I have about blogging for elementary students. As part of my job, I need to conduct workshops about BLOGGING but to make it simpler, I believe I will start with one willing teacher and hoping it will create a ripple effect.

Tags: blog, blogging, elementary

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Thanks. I hadn't thought to check that!
I started a classroom blog with 5th graders. My thought was I'd post a questions relating to reading assignments from Time for Kids magazines and let them respond. I think I would have to set up email accounts for them because in order to make comments and send you have to have an email address. I have the site set up in Edublogs which is pretty simple to get started. I thought about getting the permission from parents and maybe using pen name for their email names so their responses would be anonymous to everyone but me. I see so many useful ways blogs could be used in the classroom but it does require planning to be effective.
Has anyone heard of a LMS (learning management system) or blog software called sakia. I am not sure if it is sakia or saskia or something similar. I was told it was better than Moodle? I wonder if it could be a method for hosting middleschool or elementary student blogs and our own online classrooms?
Does anyone know how to nest pages in wikispaces? I want to have each student create a page to use as a journal/blog, but don't want that long list of 75 pages to show. I have a free Education account. Here's what I have so far. ('zz sample student' is my effort to date. No subpages, but at least they're all at the end.)

Thanks!
Do you mean that you want all of the pages to show on a single wikispaces page? This is an example of that. Each of the time chart entries is a separate page in wikispaces but I show them all together.

To do this create your page which will be holder for all of the other pages. You can put regular content on it as well as the included pages. Then use the Wikispaces Embed the Contents of a Wiki Page widget to add the contents of another page. You can allow editing of the pages withing your "container" page or not depending on how you want your students to be able to get to their page for editing.
Hi Vicky

Took me a while to get back to this. Well, I embedded the page nicely, but it still shows up on the navigation on the left. For example, I embedded 'homework--third' under 'third grade'. I'd like for that page not to show under 'navigation'. I don't see any way to hide it.

You seemed to do that, but I can't figure out how. Any ideas to help?

Thanks!
I manually maintain my Navigation menu so that I can put pages in any order I want.

If you like the order of pages but just want to leave some off, you can change the option on the Embed a List of Pages in the navigation bar (double click the media box) to only include pages with a certain tag (for example, menu) and then add the tag "menu" to the pages you want shown in the navigation.
That's funny you suggest manual maintenance. That's where I ended up today after spending over an hour trying to automate it. When I was reading the help files, it turns out they just automated the nav bar about a year ago and a lot of people didn't like it, just because of the problems I was having.

I'm good. Thanks for holding my hand.
When using edublogs is there a way to enable the students to upload files?
Our school has use https://www.gaggle.net/gen?_template=/templates/gaggle/html/index.jsp
You can start with the free account and test drive it to see if it works. You can apply for the entire school.
Just started this myself this year with 4th grade, and also starting small. So here is my answers to your question.

1. I use Weebly for our class website.

2. I don't give students email addresses. I have one student each week write a blog article. They can either email it to me, or can type it up in class. I put it on the website for them, so maybe, technically, they are not blogging?

3. I put them on a class website, and have permission from parents to publish their work. The district were cautious of my plans but did approve them if I had the appropriate disclaimers signed by parents.
Thank you for sharing this. Our school is starting small so we will not have students blog yet. Teachers will start blogging using Edublog. With good/great reviews from parents, we might move on to having students blog before the year ends or early part of next school year.

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