My intent for blogging with my students is to create a strong community with open lines of communication. I have learned that my incoming class struggles to connect with others, so my hope is that by having an interactive blog, it will be one way they can feel valued and will learn to show value in others. Creating this environment will hopefully help them to trust others more and feel safe to allow learning to happen.
I also want my students to be able to laugh; with me, with one another, and at themselves. When they get to the point of being open to laugh (when appropriate), walls of insecurity come down and trust builds. I like to incorporate fun and interactive brain breaks to give them an outlet for their energy. By giving them opportunities to learn dances to participate in, they can comfortably participate and we can all laugh together. When done, learning can happen. That is, for a little while, until the next need for a brain break poses itself.
I created different pages on my blog to try out how I could use it in my classroom. I found a few video resources to embed and link on the math page, which I am excited to continue doing for all subjects. Right now, I like building this blog, but am wondering if I should start a different one since my students will not be able to create one through Blogger (since they're not old enough).
Now my challenge is to figure out when to blog, when to update my website posted on/linked to the school website, when to use Google Classroom, and how they all fluidly combine to create enhanced learning opportunities for my students.
To address your challenge in the last paragraph, it all depends on how you use your blog. If you want to create a blog for parents and students to see what is going on in class every day, this type of blog could take the place of your website and could be used as a form of daily communication. You could also create pages that would contain information similar to what is on the different pages of your website. If you are going to have a blog that is more for your students to respond to your questions then you have to come at it from that point of view.
ReplyDeleteIf you want your students to blog as well, kidblog is a good option or your can create a Google website and create a page within the site for each of your students that they could use as their blog. If you are interested in how to do this I can show you how to set this up.
You have a lot of really good ideas and I like the idea of using the blog as a safe place for students to open up and become comfortable with each other and with themselves. Creating that safe environment is so important for those student.