Year 3 on Blog

What an exciting afternoon, we gave two of year 3 students independent access to the blog editing space for the first time today. In year 2 last year they worked with me using the blog for shared writing sessions, and were keen to give it a go for themselves, once offered the opportunity as a special writing and publishing task.

Initially we we have decided to organise, the presentation of at least one entry to the space per week as a privilege or golden time task, for students who have shown themselves to be responsible members of our class communities. Essentially although a reward, the tool is not being offered for free time, and a focussed activity is being provided for the task they will be engaging in. The students who are writing our blog entry next week, will be logging the next steps in our learning journey. They already know who they are and that it will be their job next Friday afternoon to report on and perhaps upload and input some of their favourite experiences and perhaps even share images of their learning outcomes to the space. The long term aim is to enable the students share with a wider audience and their carers an essence of what it means to be a learner in our year group.

We are currently using a WordPress based blog, hosted at ethink, we logged them in and opened the editing tool, leaving them to enter their text as they would with a word processor. The students had no problems using the space at all. As we develop our ICT Unit on Poems and Calligrams the students' experience of word processing and desk top publishing will be broadened, and they will be encouraged to increase the complexity of the material they upload and input. For now we are very excited that the "whole world can really see what we have written," please feel free to to drop by our Year Group Blog, and check things out. It would be great if you wanted to leave some comments, as this will only add to the excitement we want this space to generate. If you wouldn't mind it would also be great if you could give us a general location, so we can add this to our class map. Look forward to hearing from you.