Wednesday, March 16, 2016

KSP667 - Week 5 Reflection - Blogging in the Classroom

This week was all about blogs!  This happens to be one of my favorite subjects because over the past 15 years i have always had at least one blog going.  I have blogged about everything from random crap to books to my daughters stroke recovery to - yep, you guessed it - educational technology!  I love the medium for expressing myself.  As you can tell by my chosen digital portfolio format.  
But I have gone off course a bit - no pun intended!  This week we looked at how blogs could be used in the classroom.  And you can bet that I have a lot of ideas about this.  I have been in a battle with my district all year trying to be allowed to use Blogger in my classroom.  My vision, which is not supported by my administration, is to teach my fifth graders how to use a blog effectively.  I wanted to assign them as authors on my blog, let them post to their own pages, and teach them some web design while we were at it.  Blogger is one of the only free blogging platforms that let’s you edit both the HTML code and the CSS code.  You can customize your entire blog!
The districts resistance had a lot to do with their previous issues with some high schoolers who were never taught about being good digital citizens.  I did find a “sort of” way around the policy - we use KidBlog.  It hasn’t worked out the way I wanted it to but my students are loving this avenue to share their ideas.
One of the main tasks this week was to share our favorite blogs on the class Wiki.  I am a bit sad that this information wasn't gathered in a way that we could all walk away with a list of resources!!

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