Friday 9 October 2015

A Class Blogging Journey

Kia ora! My name is Kate Bodger and I am the E-learning leader at Bamford Primary School. Here is a little snapshot of my Blogging journey this year.


I have a fully digital class and have been thinking long and hard about how to display my children's work. Originally they had their own Blogs through Blogger, I could manage their comments through Hapara and it all seemed to be going pretty well. I had all the children set up to approve comments but found that this became a nightmare to oversee.

I have 31 year 5&6 children and found that I was not providing the children with enough meaningful formative feedback on their work as there was so many posts and comments to check regularly. The responsibility of moderating childrens work was huge, I was so wary of attributing to a young child's digital footprint in such a way, whether it be positive or negative.


I wanted a Blog that was full of student work and student voice and that they had ownership of, but did not want the children to have individual blogs anymore. So I started looking at alternative options that I could run through one account so I could moderate the content and the comments.


I set up the Blogs I wanted to have access to, one for each Maths group and one for Reading and Writing. These were separate Blogs but created using my own account. I then set up each of the Blogs onto the class Ipads using the app Easy Blogger. The children were able to upload their work instantly onto the Blog best used to publish their work. This is also a great platform to use for teachers with limited or shared resources. Our class has 4 iPads between 31 this year, so setting up the Blogs this way has helped to get more children using it. No more logging out of Easy Blogger every 5 minutes!

Using the pages section of the main Blog I used an Iframes code to insert each Blog so it would be scrolling on to each of the individual Blogs to display the children's work. Because it was still all under my account I was notified as new content or comments were added. The children had access to all of the Blogs except the main one which I kept separate.

If the children wanted to publish from a chromebook there are QR codes set up to take them straight to the Blog to upload from Chromebooks. Some children have earned editing rights to certain Blogs, but for most they show me their work and I enter the passwords for them to publish.
We spend time each week on must do’s, can do’s, literacy time, quadblogging, commenting on each other’s work and our buddy classes work. It has been a lot of trial and error and will be an ongoing work in progress to ensure the children are motivated to keep uploading and taking ownership of their work. The Iframes code below also works really well for embedding Google Docs, Drawings, Etc onto Blogger as well.

That is just a snapshot of my journey this year, any feedback or ideas are appreciated!
You can visit us at    http://room52015.blogspot.co.nz/


Ngā mihi

Kate Bodger
@kbodge

I frames code for Blogger- Make sure it is set to HTML when writing. Insert the URL between the speech marks that say Blog URL goes here.

<iframe width="100%" frameborder="0" src="Blog URL Goes Here/" height="400"></iframe>


4 comments:

  1. Brilliant read! Thanks for sharing your blogging journey Kate. I am in a similar role to you (within the Secondary context) and have also experienced the logistical nightmare of managing a large number of blogs. I really like your approach and it has given me food for thought. Would be great to catch up sometime and share ideas - perhaps at one of the #CHCHED TeachMeets...?

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  2. Thanks for the post, Kate. I have only dabbled with classroom blogging - if you can call one shared blog with one class even that. It is already a yawning cumbersome spawl of words and there are only 13 of us contributing to it. Your post has inspired me to try and tidy it up and have it being used better.

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  3. Thanks for this, Kate. This post is full of great tips for managing many blogs and has inspired me to think about how I'm managing ours.
    Thanks again!
    Bridget

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  4. Great Kate, Thanks for sharing your Class Blogging Journey. It inspired me a lot to think. Thank you so much....!
    Coding classes children

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