blogging site within 2 hours. Once I had the blogging site setup, I talked with the AO at the school about what I wanted to do. He responded by telling me that he would support me setting up a blogging site for my students, but he needed to check with the Assistant Superintendant. Thus, he sent her an email outlining what I wanted to do. After one week, he did not get a response, so he sent her another e-mail. This time, she responded within a few days. As long as “Parent Permission” was given for each student, she could see no problem with going ahead with setting up a class blogging site. My next step was to create a student permission form that outlined what I wanted to do with my students and the benefits.
After sending home a permission form on Monday, May 13th, half of my students returned their permissions forms and where blogging by the 16th. For their first blog post, I asked my students
to give their opinions on the new novel we started reading in class. And for their second blog post I asked the students to “Do a google search on M.C. Escher (we were doing an M.C. Escher inspired art lesson in art class) to find out more about him. Add your findings to the class blog.” Based on my observations, the kids where highly engaged on posting their responses and reading the responses from their peers.
learned more about area and perimeter in that 30 minutes than they did in the three lessons I had taught.
Although that was pretty powerful, the next series of events had even more of an impact. One of my students (Jayden) posted on his blog on Sunday:
"some people might like to change up their photo so its not
always a grey outline of a person. Maybe people will ask permission from
parents/guardians for changing the avatar for the account. I might change my
photo sooner or later. You don’t have too change it to yourself you can
change it too anything! (Must be apropiate) If I change my avatar I would change
it too a nice picture such as… My dog, a leaf, myself ect."
I responded to Jayden:
"Awesome idea Jayden. Once you are able to add a picture, would
you mind writing the directions in a blog post so that others can do it too.
Please remember that if you use a picture of yourself or a family member, you
need to get your parent’s permission.
Thanks Jayden for sharing your ideas"
Well, the next thing I knew, Jayden made a video on “How to change your avatar on Kidblog” using Bandicam screen recording/capture software. Then, he uploaded the video to Youtube and posted it on our class blogging site. Jayden informed me that he spent about two hours after school, on his own time, making the video. He chose to do that so he could share his learning with the rest of the class. Since then, I have had another one of my students create a very similar video, uploaded it to Youtube and posted on the class blog. Chris made a video on “How to Change Your Background Theme (Video Description).” I was amazed at how motivated students have become to share their knowledge with their peers. I guess they just needed an online space to do it in. It also amazes me how powerful peer-to-peer teaching can be. Although it took a little longer than I wanted to get set up, I think our class blog is turning out to be a great way for my students to communicate, share, and learn together.