 post that you posted yesterday? We've had friends from Japan to check it out. Your assignment today is to go on, see what they've commented, and respond back to them. So you're wanting to bring your learning outside the classroom and into the future and blogging is a great way to do that. Blogging can help advance and develop students' writing skills while adding the benefit of an authentic audience. And it's also a great way to provide and receive feedback and anybody can leave feedback. Teachers, students, family members, and community members, and all they have to do is just leave a comment on a post. Students are also given the opportunity to practice reviewing peer work as well as their own, which in turn helps them with their writing skills and their communication. Cooperative learning is also made easy by using blogs to host activities that require students to share ideas and suggestions. And by allowing students to globally connect, collaborate, and communicate, blogging takes your classroom learning not only outside but around the world. Blogs are a great way to publish student work. Children are so excited when you tell them that you're going to post their work in the hall for the entire school to see. So you can imagine how that excitement is magnified when you tell them that you're going to post it to the blog for the world to see. And there's really no right or wrong way to use the blog to publish. Here's an example where the students were asked to review their written work and pick out what they thought was their best writing. They took a snapshot of their journal and then added a reflection into their post. You can see by having that authentic audience, students were able to get feedback from other children in our class, students in other classes. Sometimes they would receive feedback from people in their family or at home. And then there's also a place where teachers can leave comments and provide feedback for the students as well. Some students were kind of stuck to the traditional writing process where they wrote everything on paper and pencil and had the rough draft and made corrections through writing conferences and then took that rough draft and basically copied it onto the computer and used that this the blog post as their final copy. And you can see that this student was able to get feedback. I like flowers. Do you into their post? And again, receiving the feedback. Some students were able to maneuver on the computer enough to where they could put their thoughts from their head right into the computer to create blog posts and publish their work. And it really just depends on the ability of the student. Now, more often than not, being in some of the lower primary grades, we have students that come to us that cannot write at all. And that's okay, too, because most blogging hosts do provide support for different types of media, pictures and the typing as well as video. And this is an example of a blog post from an All About Me project. The students were asked to create a poster that showed all about them. They come in and tell about themselves and the students are given the opportunity to ask questions of each other. And then at the end, the other students compose a piece about what they've learned about their new friend. And the star student of the day is able to create a small presentation using an app called Pics and Tell, where they use their voice to speak over just some snapshots that were taken and create a video. And that was able to be uploaded into this post here. Like Doug Dunstee, I like Krispy Kreme, and I like, um, I had fun doing my All About Me project. So you see, there's really no right or wrong way to use the blog to publish. I think the nicest aspect is that teachers can offer a differentiated means of publishing all in one place. Blogs really lend themselves to the process needed to create a digital portfolio of student work. When the students make a post to their blog, the date is entered along with a timestamp, and it makes it simple to order students entries chronologically. By providing that comment link, students are going to have a permanent record of the feedback that they were given, whether it was by a peer or another teacher. And the comment space also can allow for students to add that self reflection about their entry. And that's really powerful because the reflection will be a permanent part of the portfolio. Blogs also allow the viewers to see all the entries that are posted in one place and just really take a good look at the year's growth. And at the end of the year, sharing the portfolio is really easy because it's all available online. This is just a snapshot of one blog, but you can see where the student has progressed from not capitalizing the letter I to putting those capitalized at the beginning of the sentence. And you can really see when they start to pay attention to finger, pay finger spacing and those other conventions of traditional writing. Blogs are a great platform for students to share thoughts, express opinions or even report about what they're doing in their classroom, or what they're doing at home, maybe something that they did over the weekend that they really enjoy. And so here we have a blog from a child who went to a St. Patrick's Day parade on a Saturday. And after she went to the parade, she went home and blogged about the parade and what she did. And here are the comments. There's a teacher comment and Ava replied to that and a student comment. And she also replied to that. So as you can see, this is a great way to bring that outside world in. She gets that instant feedback that we talk about sometimes really. And the children really enjoy that. They get excited when someone comments and looks at what they're doing makes them a little more accountable for what they're doing. But so it's a great way for students to share anything that they feel they need to express. And it's also a great way for teachers to share what's happening in their room. Parents, as well as other family members, such as grandparents or aunts and uncles that live far away and don't get to see their nieces or grandchildren very often. They like to know what's happening with their grandchildren or even the parents like to know what's happening with their with their child at school. And when they ask how their day went and what they did or what was the favorite most favorite thing that they did at school that day, they most likely are not going to get a very clear or detailed answer. And so this is a great way to share with parents what their child's doing in school. This is a post of our class going on a QR code hunt, or not hunt, excuse me, a QR code tour of our school. I posted pictures so that parents get a better understanding of what we're doing and they get to see their children and what they were wearing like they were wearing hats. And this is a picture of a QR code so they can better understand that and the iPad and how they use devices. And little passports that we did. So parents are getting a more detailed description of what their children are doing in school doesn't have to be on daily basis. It could just be a special event that happened. But it makes them feel like they're more involved in their child's academics. And what's happening at school. And as you can see, another example of someone commenting on the post. Again, bringing those walls down and really broadening our communication. In our audience. So blogging is a great way for for us to share news, thoughts, expressions, not only for students, but also for teachers. Alright, now that we have talked you into blogging into the future and taking your learning outside of your classroom across the globe, it's time to get started. There are a few things that you need to think about the very first thing that you're going to need to do is gain parent permission. Now I know a lot of districts have you sign a waiver for videotaping and things like that. But you want to be really specific with your parents. Let them know what what a blog is and exactly how you're going to use it and kind of take the mystique out of it for them by informing them and let them know do do you have permission to just put their name on there or their picture or both or video because you'll find that some parents are okay with one thing, but maybe not okay with another. So be very specific when you gain that parent permission. And then you need to think about which blog host you're going to choose. And that's all personal preference. There's a ton of different blog posts, especially for education. There's kid blog, edgy blog, blogger, WordPress. We there's a ton of them and you want to find one that's user friendly and that you have access to. You want to decide based on cost. That's something that you want want to pay for if you'd like a free service and you want something that that is going to be safe. I am very familiar with kid blog. So I'm going to show you kid blog today. It's really simple to get set up. The teacher has the ultimate control and you can really choose how open you want it to be and how protected you want it to be. You can choose for it to be open to anybody in the world and then you can choose it to be only accessible to people with a code or only people in the class and you have complete control of that. You also have control of the moderation. When you sign up as a teacher, you'll have a dashboard and you can monitor posts, even drafts that they're working on and and I'm kind of like the gatekeeper and the children know that and when you talk about internet and netiquette and internet safety, they know that everything that they post is coming through me. I have to approve every post. I also have to approve all the comments and then you can also if you decide, you can also use a little more leniency and and give permission for the site to just post automatically and again that's totally up to you. But once you choose a blog post, you're going to need to think about some things. Will the students use first names only? You know, are they going to use first name and last initials or even just initials only? I would probably steer clear of using first and last name just because that just seems like a whole lot of information especially because it's not really needed and you can see on our blog, we use just first names and you might notice that some of them have just an avatar or an icon and those are the students who were given permission to blog but they didn't the parents didn't want their pictures out on the internet and also I have one or two students in the past who parents did not want them involved but I wanted them to be able to participate so we created a blog for them that wasn't public so that they could blog just within the classroom and the parents were aware of that. So you have that option too and again you need to decide who will have access to the blog. Will it be students only? Students and parents? Only those with the code or the entire world? And I've left mine open into the entire world and as you can see we've had 10,202 views on last year's blog and we haven't of those views we haven't had anything um knock on wood go wrong or any problems. You also are going to need to decide when will you provide time for the student to blog in which content area. It fits really nice into writing but we had science experiments that were posted to the blog math problems that were posted to the blog and questions that were posed to the students so it really can fit into almost any content area. You just need to make sure that again you're going over that safety in that net a kit with students. Once you have your blog posted and you've got it going there's ways to stay connected um and probably one of the easiest ways to stay connected are through social media sites and social networking sites. Um there's a lot of educators on Facebook, Edmodo, Twitter, Google Plus and they're it just really makes things accessible and so that's a great way to connect with other classrooms. There is also a site called comments for kids and it allows you to enter your blog information to be reviewed and then your blog can be chosen as the blog spotlight and this is a really good way to get your blog out there in the educational community and the students would think it's real nice when you get to put this badge on there that you were a spotlight site but that's one of the ways that we were able to hook up with um with other classes and stay connected and keep because the the whole idea of the blog is to have that open communication back and forth and so that was a really easy way to do that. If you'd like more information subscribe to our iTunes view course.