Three and 1/2 weeks in and I'm still loving seventh graders. I posted yesterday about a short unit I taught this week on September 11th. One thing I haven't shared yet is our journey into blogging.
Out of my three classes, I've already taught 2/3 of the kids when they were in fifth grade. If they were in my class, they blogged with me then. To a third of them, however, blogging is new territory. It's also new to my seventh grade colleague who teachers the other sections of language arts. Since she's just learning the ropes with kids and blogs, and since we have a large group who hadn't blogged before, we elected to make the blogs private to the five classes at first.
That left me with a dilemma. Something I believe in strongly is that power of being heard. I wanted my students to be able to share their thoughts with the world if they chose. The thing I've always loved about KidBlog was that kids can choose - blogs can go to classmates, connections (classes that follow our blogs), or public. By making our blogs private, they didn't have the option of sharing their posts. So I tried to think of a solution.
I have a class website on Weebly that is a landing spot for many things in our class. I added a page there called "classroom blog." This week as students added their blogs on September 11th, I told them to let me know if they wanted their posts added to the "public" blog. Not all of them are done, yet, but several have asked me to put their blogs up. If you have a chance, could you swing by there and leave them a comment? I can't wait to see where this takes them. Thanks!
CLASS BLOG
