Blogging is a great way for children to share their learning in real time. It is also a wonderful opportunity for them to share their learning globally. We have 116 children in Year 5-8 and they all have an individual blog. We are using these as electronic portfolios or learning journals, gone are the publishing books and the profiles much to the delight of many. With the expectation of each child posting at least one example of learning a week parents now have the opportunity of seeing their children's work way more often than they would have with the publishing books.
However - there are some drawbacks. If you take a publishing book home - you can hand it to your parents and they can thumb through it. It can sit on the bench or the coffee table and its presence can be a reminder to have a look.
These electronic portfolios (blogs) are not so obvious and I am left wondering how many parents look at their children's blogs weekly. I am also wondering how we can facilitate this happening more often.
These slides are a crowd sourced co-constructed presentation, people have shared their ideas on how to encourage blog engagement. There are some fabulous ideas - some of which I am keen to try.
Patrick has also shared this link with me. Children using the app movenote to encourage their parents to engage.
Remembering that one of my hunches was that parents don't feel that comfortable commenting on the blogs (and this is backed up unoffically by Amanda's evidence she has collected) we aim to run a parent education session on Blogger on 22 June.
We have just embarked on a combined approach to this with Hoon Hay School. This week we ran a session on Chromebooks and Google Drive - it was well attended and I found this rewarding - finally not a session to convince people of the merits of the 1:1 initiative - but a session attended by parents who were wanting to learn what their children were learning. The feedback was fantastic. We shared a summary document with them and some of the parents have already shared their new learning with us.
Parents register for the sessions using a google form.
I am hoping that we will get more parent engagement after this session. Should be easy to measure - Can I get the students this week to count up the number of comments on their blogs, then compare a week after the session?? All ideas welcome here please!!
More wonderings...
1.One of the major bonuses of blogs is the fact that children can get feedback from anyone - in theory - however unless we let people know that the blogs are there - this is not going to happen. How do we do this?
Ideas
- tweet the links out
- share more via facebook
- quadblogging ... with other schools or within the school?
2. Should all work on a blog be error free?
My initial reaction to this is - Yes of course! However I am told that if we expect this some children will never post anything. I am still working on this and am keen to get feedback from staff - a topic to visit in Term 3.
Ideas
A blurb on the blog that is static (able to be seen in the side bar) that explains that these are examples of the student's work - some are edited, some are not... it's ok that there are errors in some of the pieces...
There is certainly a lot of food for thought here. Do you think the students will feel ignored if their parents fail to comment on their blog? Do you think the students feelings about the comments would be worth tracking?
ReplyDeleteThanks Trudy - yes tracking the students feelings is a great idea - will now have a think about how to do that - and then reporting that information to the parents could make a real difference. Thanks.
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