 CESAW blogs are a simple way to showcase the amazing work students are doing in the classroom with the broader community. Blogging gives students an authentic audience of their classmates, family members, and other students around the globe, encouraging better work and providing opportunities for real feedback. The CESAW blog is a powerful place for students to share and showcase their best work. When you connect families, they are able to comment and see all posts shared to your classroom blog, providing all students with an authentic audience for their work. After an in-class writing celebration, students can post their final writing piece to the journal and publish them to the blog so that family members who aren't able to attend can still celebrate all students' hard work. All blog posts must be approved by you as a teacher before they are added to the blog. Connecting with other classroom blogs in your community or world gives students different perspectives and allows them to express themselves creatively with a broader audience. CESAW Connected Blogs is a safe way for students to engage with other classrooms to share their learning, and it's built right into CESAW. To connect to another blog, go to your class settings and tap on Connected Blogs under the Class Blogs section. Here you will need to add the CESAW blog URL from the other teacher in your class settings. Connect with other classroom blogs to engage in book club discussions. Students can share their point of view on the characters, plot, author's purpose, and more. As a class, you and your students can create a list of discussion questions to pose to your connected classrooms. Not only does this reinforce needed literacy skills, but it also supports students in developing questioning techniques and communication skills. If students are learning about an event or injustice in the community or world, they can post their ideas to the blog to gather support, advocate, and organize a collective action. Maybe students are learning about the Flint water crisis and how some areas of our country and world do not have clean drinking water. Use the blog to raise awareness and get the classrooms that your blogs are connected to involved in the cause. Students can also use the blog to support causes that are relevant to their own community. Advocating for a cause can be as simple as using the blog to gather and share information to support longer recess times. Students can reach out to connected blogs across the globe to determine how much time they have for recess. They can post a question to the blog to see how long other children across the globe have for recess, and post discussion questions where other classes post about why play is important and how recess impacts learning. The CESAW blog gives students a safe space to articulate opinions, helps foster empathy and community by connecting students with people outside of the walls of their classroom, and allows them to practice digital citizenship skills such as being thoughtful, appropriate, and kind online. Your challenge this week is to enable your class blog and plan and publish your first post. Share the fun ways you use the CESAW blog on Twitter using the hashtag CESAW me a minute.