Let your primary school learners create Blogger blogs to use as digital portfolios

I blurred our learners' faces using https://www2.lunapic.com/editor/?action=blu

What is a blog?

Blogging is an online, digital form of writing that has always appealed to me as a teacher. I see blogging as an exciting way to enable my students to express their thoughts and share them with the world while learning the important lessons of online safety at the same time. We use blogs as digital portfolios so that the learners can show their families what they have created. We use Blogger because the teacher can have control over the blogs.

The amount of learning that can happen through blogging is very beneficial. The students not only learn about online safety, but also about formatting, editing, and how to work with images and videos as they work on their blogs. best is they are creating!

The classes were able to create lovely headers in Canva and they added their avatars and poems to their blogs as well.

Examples of our blogs

The Grade 2s - 7s participated in World Read Aloud Day 2022

  

Today was World Read Aloud Day and we celebrated this in my Grade 2 – 7 ICT classes at school with Nali’bali. We downloaded Nal'ibali's #WRAD story,  A Party in the Park, on our Chromebooks, and we all read together in unison. Then we discussed the story in the form of an oral book review. The children loved it. 

Nal'ibali aimed to get 1 million families to pledge their family to read aloud the Nal'ibali special story on World Read Aloud Day 2022 - 2 February. If only parents could realise and embrace the importance of regular reading in brain development – if only they could see the big picture about this. They would then definitely make reading aloud to children a daily priority!

The importance of reading aloud to children

Here are some useful quotes from articles and studies about the importance of reading aloud to children: 

“Reading regularly with young children stimulates optimal patterns of brain development, which helps build strong pathways in the brain and in turn builds language, literacy, and social-emotional skills that can have life-long health benefits.”
- from '‘Reading to young children develops their brains.'   https://bit.ly/3KYQnxr 

"A child care provider reads to a toddler. And in a matter of seconds, thousands of cells in these children’s growing brains respond. Some brain cells are ‘turned on,’ triggered by this particular experience. Many existing connections among brain cells are strengthened. At the same time, new brain cells are formed, adding a bit more definition and complexity to the intricate circuitry that will remain largely in place for the rest of these children’s lives.

Therefore, the more adults read aloud to their children, the larger their vocabularies will grow and the more they will know and understand about the world and their place in it, assisting their cognitive development and perception." (An excerpt from a study on toddlers’ cognitive development as a result of being read aloud to) - Quoted from:  https://www.all4kids.org/news/blog/the-importance-of-reading-to-your-children/

As we come out of the Pandemic, let's prioritise reading aloud to children in order to develop their reading skills. The long-term benefits are immeasurable.

Getting started with a collaborative Google Slides presentation in Grade 5

This year I wanted to introduce a Grade 5 class to Google Slides in a collaborative way. Last year, with this class, we did a lot of work using Microsoft PowerPoint. I have to say that Microsoft PowerPoint is still one of my favourite applications for all time mainly because of all the different ways you can use it - but using it collaboratively is really not easy at all. Google Slides offers that benefit - so it is becoming a firm favourite.

Lesson goals

I wanted the students to:

• experience how easy it is for a whole class to use one Google document at the same time 
• learn how to share the finished product to their own Google accounts 
• complete the task at home if they didn't finish 
• learn the inns and outs of images, fonts, and background colour

Giving the assignment

Naturally, I created the lesson using Google Classroom. The students opened their Google accounts and logged on to Google Classroom and away we went!

The task
The class had to open the slide presentation I had created and shared in Google Classroom. It had an example slide. Their task:

• add a slide and create something similar 
• write an acrostic poem description of themselves using adjectives 
• add an avatar image they had created in a previous lesson and crop it 
• add their names using WordArt 
• use colour for their selected fonts 
• colour the background

The results 
The class enjoyed this task and they loved looking at each others' completed slides.

Other collaborative lesson ideas for Google slides
Here are three ideas I want to try soon:

• Do a collaborative project in groups 
• Write a collaborative story using Google slides
• Learn how to organise research on a collaborative slide presentation (idea via Richard Byrne's blog)