Claire and Kristen have now posted 21 student blog entries. They are seeing a lot of student enthusiasm. The students really want to write pieces to put on their blog. The teachers came up with an editing rubric, which the students have to use to get their work published. They are finding that the students are really investing their energy and time to show the teachers quality work in order to get published. So the teachers are seeing a lot of quality work and motivation. The students are realizing they can't just post anything on the blog. There's a lot of hard work and dedication that goes into it first. The students then read their blog posts to the class on the Smartboard, which helps with fluency. This also generates pride in their work and makes other students want to do it, as well.
Thanks to Bob Rowan's help, Kristen and Claire figured out how to allow people (meaning parents) to comment on student blog posts. The teachers first will approve the comments before they go up.
Claire and Kristen are now going to play around with adding color and photos to blog entries.
http://www.fourthgradewritingwizards.blogspot.com/
Jeff has posted more than a dozen student blog entries so far on a wide variety of topics, from movie reviews to observations about Woodlynde and their own lives outside of school. These are primarily from his freshman journalism class. Students are working on more blog entries as of this writing. The students seem to enjoy the process and like seeing their work posted. It has worked out really well for Jeff, because he can have his students blog while they are in between major journalism assignments. Jeff has figured out how to also post pictures with the blog entries, so he is putting up a photo of the student who has written the entry. New blog posts are advertised on the Informer's Facebook Fan page and there is also a notification of the site on the Informer's website. One of the blog posts received a student comment.
His goal is to make sure every journalism elective student has at least one blog post, then to continue expanding the effort into his other journalism classes.
http://woodlyndeinformer.blogspot.com
Claire, Kristen and Jeff hope that more people will read the blog entries and comment on them.
