PE4_kidblog

In a way I began thinking about this blog in August. When school started I wanted to have a blogging platform in place. I wanted to introduce my ideas for student blogging during the first days of school and for meet the teacher events. I teach 4^th grade and in Texas that is the first year that learners are tested in writing. The testing is rigorous and the students are often ill prepared. I felt strongly that blogging had the potential to diminish the dread of “the writing year”. I was convinced that the interactive nature of blogging could benefit every learner. I did actually introduce a platform but it turned out that the former application could not be used to support blogs for an entire class. We managed to post a few great blogs but the previous platform required lots of parent involvement and while they were fun for the kids, we weren’t reaping the benefits I had intended. After lots of trials and attempts with other platforms I finally found kidblog.com. We used kidblog for the first time this week. Now all my students have their own blogs linked to my class website and they are lovin’ it! Yesterday we had 19 blogs posted and 97 comments were received class wide! Kidblog is attractive, super easy to use and has all the basic word processing tools. Some of my students do not have a computer at home and have had little to no experience keyboarding but that obviously did not get in their way. One of the blog replies read, “This is a good book!” I’m excited about the potential of kidblog.com. This is the blogging tool I’ve been looking for.