I can't tell you how excited I am right now. This afternoon I logged onto my computer to see a request to approve a blog written by one of my students on our kidblog . I've set up a class kidblog so that every student has their own page to blog, password protected and all. Not only did they blog from home, on a long weekend here in Canada, but they even added a family photo. No sooner than I had posted a comment and approved her blog for the world to see, did I receive another e-mail letting me know that there was another blog to moderate from a second student. Then, a few minutes later a third blog from a third student.
In the past I've had a class website through our district server, but this year I took the step even further by having a class blog. Snooping around other class blogs I realized what I wanted even more was a place for my students to do their own blogging - whether they were at home or at school. Two weeks ago I gave them their individual passwords, and I showed them their individual blogs. This week we headed back to the lab to try and write on our blogs, but it was taking us forever to log on so I decided to use the time to go over internet and blogging safety. Don't worry we had already talked about it but I had a great video that I wanted to show them too. I then snuck back into the lab after school and set up a quick link to our class blog so we would no longer have trouble getting to our blogs. So this week, the plan was (is) to utilize all the computers we have access to in our school lab so that everyone could write their own first blog. I figured after that everyone would start blogging from home. We of course would (will) continue to blog from school too.
You can imagine how excited I am right now knowing that three of my students have already blogged from home. And to make things even better, after I shared this exciting news with my PLN on twitter (I love you guys) each student received three additional comments from amazing grade one teachers in other parts of the world.
My class schedule is set up so that my students have time in the day to do their own self directed writing. I know once they see the audience they have with their blogs everyone else in the class will be excited to blog too. Ideally I'd love to be able to offer a computer to anyone that would like one but my reality is I have one (possibly two) class computer(s) that they will be able to do their blogging on. Not ideal of course, but we will make it work.
I don't think I've ever been this excited to see my students after a long weekend. I am so glad I'm doing this with my class. So very, very glad.
I am a K-4 teacher with the Vancouver School District (formerly teaching in Surrey Schools). With 30+ years of experience and a bunch of improvements along the way, I still have so much more to learn. This blog is a way to help me process and share all that I'm discovering on my quest to be the best educator I can be.
Monday, October 10, 2011
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I'm so glad that you are as well, and I absolutely love your student blogs! I also love how genuinely excited you are here too. Your students are very fortunate to have a teacher that cares about them so mch!
ReplyDeleteAviva