Lower School Blogging - Baby Steps

For awhile now I've wondered how successful blogging would be in lower school. I read a lot of class blogs, but that wasn't what I was looking for, so I found a few teachers at my school who were willing to give blogging a try. We started slowly with one second grade class, and now we have a third and fourth grade class blogging and commenting. The first grade teachers may join with a class blog, but they thought individual posts would be too much for some of their students. The three teachers who are doing this with me have taken time to learn about blogging themselves and read some of the 6 part series on the Langwitches Blog. We started with a prompt or topic for the students to write about, and allowed them to comment on several posts. Then we looked at the comments and talked about what made a good comment and why? One of the second graders said, "It's like talking to my friends anytime I want to."
Only one class has opened the posts up and let the students write about anything that interested them, but they were the first class to blog. Third grade is using it to get feedback and help with their poetry writing. The teacher also wants to use the blog as a way for the students to reflect on the unit. Our 4th graders are just beginning, and enjoyed their first time last week.
We haven't had much feedback from the parents yet, but one parent liked the 3rd grade blog and was glad the students' posts were focused on a topic for school. While it was nice to hear, we want the student blogs to be a mixture of educational reflection and thinking as well as individual expression.
I'm hoping we will have the classes reading and commenting on each other's posts soon. We are all learning about this together.

More than a Lurker

Author Cathy Davidson defines learning as "a constant disruption of an old pattern, a breakthrough that substitutes something new for something old in a cyclical process."

Well, that is what happened to me this week. For over a year, I have been reading and listening to people talk about the importance of building your own personal learning network. So I signed up for Twitter, got a Google Reader account and started trying to find some people to follow and read a few blogs. It was hard to find time for this, and when I did, I didn't get that much out of it. So why should I keep trying? Then I started the PLP professional development program, and in one week I have become more than just a lurker. The light bulb finally went off! I learned how to find people to follow using the #tag which led me to #web20classroom and some great Twitter tips . I'm learning about some great links that I'm sharing with my faculty as well as retweeting. I now want to have a PLN that I can contribute to and learn from. The contributing part is new for me. I always felt I didn't really have anything to contribute, and feared saying something stupid. (I do that all the time anyway.)


But now, if I can help just one person or get one new idea, that is GREAT! My old thoughts about Twitter and RSS feeds were disrupted and replaced with a new broader way of learning and sharing with others.


A colleague said to me, there is nothing wrong with lurking. In fact, I needed to do just that to see how people used Twitter, blogs, and social networks. But it's exciting to learn even more and start to build my own PLN.