Student Blogging Challenge #1: Why I want my Grade 4 – 7 learners to have their own blogs

Flickr https://goo.gl/M2mOtO

Blogging is a digital form of writing that has always appealed to me as a teacher. I see blogging as an exciting way to enable my learners to express their thoughts and share them with the world while learning the important lessons of online safety at the same time. The amount of learning that can happen through blogging is priceless.



Why I want my learners to blog

1) Blogging is a great way to introduce Internet safety:
These days our learners need to know how to keep safe online. We start off by learning about online safety and all the precautions we need to take to keep safe. The main rule is that to be safe online we must not post personal information about ourselves such as our last name, our email address, phone number, home address, etc. When commenting on posts often learners have to give their email addresses and I always explain that this is fine as it’s not posted on the Internet; however they must only use their school address.

2) Blogging is a great way to introduce politeness
Our learners need to know that on the Internet they must be polite at all times. They should never post anything that could hurt anyone. When they comment on other blogs they need to realise that they represent their school and that the world will judge the school by their words.

3) Blogging is a fantastic way to strengthen the connections between the school and home
Parents and relatives can view the bogs and get an insight to the work the learners are doing.

4) Blogging is a great way to connect learners to the world
Every year Edublogs runs a Student Blogging Challenge, a ten-week challenge which connects learners and also teaches great blogging skills. This year my classes are participating so that we get a good start to our blogging adventures. Commenting on other blogs is a great way to be an active blogger.

5) Blogging is a great way to promote writing
Blog writing introduces a whole new range of digital writing skills such as hyperlinking, embedding. Adding media, knowledge about creative commons licenses and plagiarism, categorising posts, commenting on other posts and labelling posts, etc. It also focuses on traditional writing characteristics and the need for good content, correct grammar and interesting vocabulary. When learners realise they are writing for a wider audience their writing improves.

6) Blogging promotes 21st century skills
Silvia Tolisano posted this excellent poster on her Langwitches Blog which sums up the 21st Century skills that can be addressed through blogging.

Silvia Tolisano https://goo.gl/xZZG7y  

How I got started with setting up the blogs

Since I am the G Suite administrator at my school, I am able to provide every child in Grade 4-7 with a school email address, with a control over lost passwords. I use Google Classroom for all my directives to the learners, and also as a place where they add their assignments. When it was time for use to start our blogs we logged into our school email addresses and typed in 'Blogger'. This took us to a place where we could create a blog that was controlled by our school with the same login and password details as the learners' email addresses.

I then asked the learners to post their new blog addresses into Google Classroom, and I also made a list of all the blog addresses on my own technology blog for easy access.

Let me close this post with another fantastic resource from Silvia Tolisano's Langwitches blog. This summarises suggested steps for blogging in the classroom.

Silvia Tolisano https://goo.gl/Kfjoj