When I began to plan Genius Hour this year I knew I wanted to try something different in the way that my students shared their information with me and others. While I was taking a course this summer we had a guest speaker that talked about her unit on student blogging and I had one of those "Light Bulb" moments! Student blogging seemed like such an amazing idea and a great way to begin teaching my students about 21st century communication and technology skills. As I set about my journey I came across Kidblog which is an amazing platform! First off, Kidblog is a completely secure online blogging platform created for classrooms. This platform offers a simple and user friendly design and allows students to exercise their authentic voice. For me this was a way to get my students sharing their ideas, research, and get them interacting to each other and their genius hour topics. Kidblog is also a great way to share the classroom experiences with parents and other learners. One thing that I have come to find invaluable to our process is that this website offers a completely secure environment that the teacher has control over. I can keep my students information and ideas safe and can choose to share them when I want and with who I want. With this platform a teacher can also control student posts and comments by having to approve posts before they are visible to the entire class. So now lets get to it and I will give you an overview of how I have been using Kidblog in my Genius Hour this year. The above picture is of the home screen that students see when they log on. All settings and images are customizable for your classroom or theme. Kidblog does a great job of visually organizing information so it is easy for students to find. Each student can create a new post and customize their images, font and colours to make their blog unique. Above is one of my students profiles. Nash has worked very hard on his blog this year and has done an amazing job of collecting information on his very interesting topic...TANKS! Here I am showing only posts that he wrote. As you can see each one is titles and he has added his own touches with different images. Kidblog allows for a great interactive experience. As students do research I ask them to do daily tasks, the image above shows my request for a website that they had been using that day to learn about their topics. The great thing about using a platform like this is that research now is mainly done on the internet and students can insert videos, images and links to the resources they have found. This helps all of us keep track of their sources and be able to go back to favourite or helpful websites in the future. Kidblog allows interaction between students, teachers and parents by having comment sections. Each blog post has a comments section where I or their peers can comment. Above we see Nash responding to a blog post about crash to pass. Within the comments section students engage with their peers to make personal connections and to ask questions. I have found the comments to be one of the most challenging and most valuable aspects of kidblog. During the first weeks of our blogging we had to stop and have several discussions about constructive commenting but overall students have been amazing at asking each other questions and really driving their learning forward by giving their peers other ideas to research. A teacher can also invite parents and other educators to their blog which can greatly expand the learning community.
Student blogging is a very valuable activity and has given my students the opportunity to learn more about how to interact with an online community. I feel that this is so valuable especially with the push to teach 21st century skills. Blogging with my students has sure been an adventure but the students now ask daily to blog and are so excited to interact with their peers online. I hope you enjoyed this glimpse into our blogging adventure. Please check out the Kidblog platform and I would love to hear about your student blogging experiences! Cheers, Brianna
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