Kidblog
Kidblog is a school-friendly blogging platform that is used by thousands of students across the country. The site primarily targets elementary-aged students and provides teachers with a wealth of resources. The blogging platform offers a nice integration with Google, so it's easy for students to quickly share documents, images, and presentations on their blogs. The website offers a variety of membership levels to meet the needs of teachers and schools. The site offers a 30 day trial to assess the quality of the resource.
In this unit, students will share their learning with the world. Following our Skype session with the meteorologist, students will craft a blog post that details their new learning in the form of a message for a reader who may live in an area impacted by severe weather conditions. To see a sample of a teacher blog on Kidblog, click here.
Teacher Notes:
In this unit, students will share their learning with the world. Following our Skype session with the meteorologist, students will craft a blog post that details their new learning in the form of a message for a reader who may live in an area impacted by severe weather conditions. To see a sample of a teacher blog on Kidblog, click here.
Teacher Notes:
- Kidblog requires some initial set up to get rolling. First, the teacher must create an account.
- Once you have a teacher account set up, you can create student accounts. There are a few ways to do this, but the easiest is using the Kidblog join code.
- Students have tons of customization options available for their blogs. They can upload an avatar, changes the background and colors, and add a name. This process takes some time as they're often very excited.
- The biggest consideration when utilizing a tool like Kidblog is privacy. Kidblog offers a nice variety of publishing options and controls. Students (and teachers) can classify posts based upon the audience. So, some posts can be visible to friends and family, while others are available publicly.
- Also, similar to making decisions about visibility, you will need to make some choices about commenting. The biggest advantage to using a blog is the option for students to experience an authentic audience, so allowing public commenting is often to your advantage. That said, moderation is required.
- In this unit, students will be publishing a post about their learning. The expectation is that students will draft at least a paragraph detailing their learning around severe weather preparation. To provide students with an authentic audience, making this post publicly visible will be helpful.
- To drive readers to your blog, there are several hashtags that you can post the link to on Twitter. These hashtags let people know that your students have posts awaiting comments. I often send these links out to parents using tools like Remind 101.