 Hi, this is Karen Keenan and I want to welcome you to my presentation, a digital journey with primary students and no budget. If you have been thinking about starting to blog or use other digital tools with your primary students, this is the presentation for you. Over the next 20 minutes or so, I'm going to convince you why you should blog with your students and then help you get started. If you're on Twitter, please post your thoughts and questions using the hashtag K12Online12 and be sure to use my Twitter handle, KarenTeaches. If you're not on Twitter, you better get started. I am a teacher in the city of Chicago. For the past four years, I taught second grade at a school with many immigrant and refugee students. I now teach third grade at a magnet school where students receive daily instruction in French, Spanish, Italian or Chinese. Working at such diverse schools has opened my eyes to the need to connect with the world around us. As teachers in the 21st century, we have great tools and easy reach to support these connections. Last year, my class skyped with a first grade class in Texas who had been raising chicks. While I was not brave enough to raise chicks in my own classroom, this teacher was and her students shared everything they learned about the transformation of eggs to chicks with my students. While it took me a while to get comfortable with the idea of skyping, there were many other things I did first in the classroom. These types of connections and learning opportunities are within quick grasp and I hope this talk encourages and inspires you to make those connections. I did mention that you can do all of this without any budget. Many of our schools are lucky enough to provide teachers with computers, have computer labs or even have a set of laptops on a cart. If you're not so lucky or if you want to add a computer to your classroom for your students to use, I suggest you start a Donors Choose account. Donors Choose is a non-profit that connects public school teachers with people who want to support classroom learning. They've helped bring over 300,000 projects to life since 2000. Through Donors Choose, I have been able to secure 9 netbook computers, which makes it possible for each of my students to get on the computer in our classroom every day. Before you start any projects, make sure that your computers will connect the network and any other requirements your district may have. After you've set up a Donors Choose account, you're going to want to make your own classroom project. To get inspiration for my projects, I like to search and see what other teachers are doing. At the top of the main page, you can click Projects. From here, you can see all sorts of projects by location or category, but you can also search for keyword, like netbooks. Here, we can see Mrs. Nutt's project, where she's working on getting netbooks to replace an outdated, slow computer. If you scroll down, you can see Project Details. This will tell you what specifically she's requested, the vendor that she's getting from, and the price. My suggestion is to search for several different projects to get ideas for your project description, as well as to see the best value for items. Always start small on Donors Choose. A project for a few hundred dollars is much, much more likely to be funded than a project for a few thousand dollars. Periodically, Donors Choose offers partner funding opportunities. If you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you can see the opportunities by state. Get creative and make sure that your project describes what these funders are looking for. Donors Choose also has double your impact and match code opportunities, so watch for those to arrive in your email inbox. Now that you've gotten yourself the equipment you need, you can start to think about what projects you are going to do in your classroom. I first started blogging with my students because it seemed like everyone on Twitter was talking about it. As I thought about blogging with my students, I realized what an important media tool it had become. When I wanted to share my learning about the Daily Five, I started a blog. And when I wanted to learn what others were doing with the Daily Five, I went and visited their blogs. If I want to get the best scoop on what happened on last night's Bachelorette or Bachelorette, there's a blog. And when I need a new recipe for my crock pot, there's a blog for that too. When you think about blogging, you have to ask yourself, who do you want your students' audience to be? Should the work they are creating only be viewed by you? Or is it something that can be shared with the world? The focus of my master's research was the impact of blogging as an authentic audience for students. The question I posed was would my students be more interested in writing or take more time with their writing if they knew others would read their work? In his 2008 article, The Power of Audience, Stephen Levy wrote, When student work culminates in a genuine product for an authentic audience, it makes a world of difference in student engagement, learning, and achievement. He went on to say that the most effective way to engage students in learning is to create an authentic audience, giving them a sense that someone else, besides teachers and parents, cares about their work. When I asked my students who read the work they did in class but didn't publish online, students replied with I don't know, no one, or just you. When I asked my students who read the work they published on their blog, they identified classmates, other teachers, and their family members. All 25 of the students I interviewed reported that they liked blogging. Their answers to why included because you get to write to people who are far away, because people can look at our blogs and can comment on them, and because I get to write stuff that happened in my life. Many students commented that they needed to take extra care when writing on their blogs. One of my students said, when I'm writing, I say, because someone's going to read my blog, I should take my time to be serious about it and do my best. Another student said that the best thing about blogging is that you could type anything you want, but it has to be something that makes sense. Now, if 25 out of 25 second graders agree that this is worth their time, I hope you all agree it is. Okay, now that I've convinced you that blogging is a worthwhile investment of your class time, let me help you get set up. There are many different blog hosts that you can use. I love kid blog, so I'm going to show you how to get your account set up there. From the kid blog homepage, you need to click on create a class. As you can see, it's a really easy form and you can even sign up with Google. I already have an account, so I'm going to sign in on my classes page by clicking login in the upper right hand corner. All I have to do is select my name and enter my password. Now I have access to the control panel. Under the control panel, you can click on users to add new users. Last year, I used student first names for their blogs. This year, I have asked parents to select the username for their child. Each school has different regulations to provide for the safety of its students when using the internet. Before starting any digital projects, check with your principal to make sure that you follow those guidelines. On the control panel, you can also select setting to change the blog title or the theme. Make sure you check out all the themes because there are a lot of fun ones. Under the comments section, you can restrict who can comment on blog posts, or require comments or posts to be approved before appearing. It's very easy to approve comments. You just go up to the comments section. The yellow ones are new ones, and you click approve. This year, I have set up a password protected account for parents to be able to leave comments. I was able to do this by checking allow users with guest role to leave comments. One of the best things about KidBlog is that you can set the controls and settings to do what works for you, your school, and your students. When you begin to blog with your students, it is important that you teach them how to properly post information on the internet. We've all heard stories about people posting inappropriate information that has led them to get in lots of trouble, be suspended from school, or even lose their jobs. To begin blogging with students, I recommend that you write blogs as a whole class. On the first day of school, I had my students provide little snippets about what we had done that day. As they watched on the projector, I typed them in. At the end of the first week, I had my students write short paragraphs as table groups, and I typed them into the blog. My next step will be having students write paper blogs. Carol McLaughlin wrote a wonderful blog post on paper blogging with her second graders, and the picture that she included served as a great visual for me. You can see that students wrote their comments on the post-it notes. Even with my modeling of what is appropriate for blogging, I have had students include questionable material in their blogs or comments. That's why I like to approve posts and comments before they appear on the internet, so if this occurs, I can speak to the student directly. If you visit Common Sense Media and go to their Educator section, you can view the many different lesson plans they have on a variety of topics. You can see that the topics includes digital creation, internet safety, online privacy, and social networking and community. Remember to start slowly when students begin blogs. Take the time to model how to write a blog post several times. As with all things teaching, the more time you put in upfront to build your routines and practices, the less time you'll spend being frustrated later. To really create an authentic audience for your students, it is crucial that they comment on each other's posts and receive comments. With younger students or those just getting started with their blogs, it can be helpful to type something they've already written. That way their time on the computer can be spent reading and responding to each other's blogs. Another idea is to have students end their blog posts with a question, such as this post that Garnel wrote about his dream. Because Garnel ended with a question, his readers had plenty of things to comment on. You might be wondering who Garnel's commenters were. Many of the comments on my students' blogs come from my family and friends. I notify them of new blog posts by posting links on my Facebook page and tweeting about our new blog posts. On Twitter, there is a hashtag comments for kids. This is a hashtag that notifies teachers and education supporters that students have blog posts ready to be commented on. For comments for kids, I follow the karma approach, what goes around comes around. I make sure to post on other students' blogs in hopes that it inspires another teacher or supporter to comment on my students. It's also great to send email blasts to parents when new posts are written, so that they are able to comment as well. Encourage parents to share the link with their family, as well as comment on many of the children's posts in the classroom. Something I haven't tried yet, but I want to, is quad blogging. Quad blogging is where four classes support each other by commenting on one class's blog per week. You can find many more details at quadblogging.net. Once you have gotten your students' blogging, you can have them create other digital projects that they can post on their blogs. One of my favorite digital projects to have students create are voice threads. Using voice threads, students upload pictures or other digital images and then record their voices over the image. When raising caterpillars, I have had students make daily reflections using voice thread. The voice thread app is fantastic when on a field trip. You can easily take pictures and then record student voices while you're still on your trip. After making a voice thread, it is very easy to embed it into a blog. At the end of the voice thread, you click on embed, and then you press copy this. In kit blog, you press new post, type a title for your blog. If it's on visual, you'll want to click over to HTML, and then you paste the embed code into your blog and press publish. You might have to refresh your page to see your post. There it is. Just like Ms. Wajia's post, where she created several clues for her classmates to guess a particular country. As you can see, she received many comments from her classmates who all knew that it was China. Audio Boos are another fun digital project, and they have both an app and a site. After you've created an audio boot, it is really easy to embed it. You click on the name of your boot, click embed, and you're going to click on more options. To embed in kit blog, you press if all else fails. You're going to copy the code, and in your new post, you're going to paste it. You publish, you might want to refresh the page, and then we can listen to a little bit of this recording. As you can see, that would be really fun for parents who weren't able to make it to the concert. Well, I hope that you're ready to jump to new heights in your digital journey with your students. You might be ready to blog, or even go further and do an audio boot or a voice thread. You might be ready to visit Skype and see what opportunities that has for you and your students. I hope that you had as much fun as I did, and thank you for joining us on K-12 Online.