Blogging


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**Why blog with your students?**

__Motivation:__ Many students who may struggle to write or feel unmotivated to write on their own will find it exciting to write for a global audience.

__Feedback__: One of the best ways to teach students constructive criticism or give them examples of good/poor writing is to have them read and critique each other's work!

__Easy access to student writing:__ If you feel overwhelmed trying to keep up with your students' journal writing, have them write a blog post. Then you can easily access all of your students' work in one place from home and from school.

__Sharing successes:__ Blogging with your students opens up your classroom walls. Parents can now get a glimpse of what is going on in the classroom as well as a snapshot of what their child is learning in class.

**How can I start a blog?** You can use Kidblog or Edublogs or even the blogging feature in Schoology to get your students started. Decide whether you want the posts to be public (//Kidblog// or //Edublogs)// or viewable only by their peers (//Schoology//).

**What to blog about?** Students can blog about classroom events, about a book they are reading, about a math concept they are learning. They can create stories or even make their own mathematical word problems for their classmates to figure out.

Check out Linda Yollis' awesome classroom blog

**How do I manage student blogs?** You can have a designated blogger of the week or you can have students rotate through and type up their post as a center. Have them hand write it first to save time. You can also just maintain a class blog as a teacher to broadcast what your students are doing. Offer 'guest blogger' posts by students when they do extraordinary work or you want to share student voices.

[|See this great example of organizing and managing student blogs:]

**Spreading the Word** To get as much readership as possible for your student/class blog, [|check out the Comments4Kids blog]. There are also lots of ideas there for teaching your students how to leave and respond to comments.

Interested in starting your own blog to post reflections and successes or a class blog to share what your class is up to? Let the Tech Team know and we'll help get you started! Some good places to start: Blogger, Kidblog.