Starting Right

Sheryl Forsman has just started blogging with her first grade students.  Before she started blogging, she spent a lot of time thinking about why she would blog and what she would do if she had a blog.  How do I know?  Just look at this list that was one of the first entries on her blog.

 

20 Uses for Our Classroom Blog  

Why did we create a classroom blog and how will we use it?
1. document our growth across the year
2. inform families of what we are doing
3. expand our audience
4. collaborate with other first grade bloggers
5. use another form of writing
6. learn about writing for an audience
7. learn about digital literacy
8. document favorite events of this year
9. integrate writing with other subjects
10. write book reviews
11. write journal entries
12. respond to class assignments
13. free choice writing
14. develop keyboard skills
15. communicate with each other
16. collaborate with reading buddies from other classrooms
17. collaborate with teachers from the university as blogging buddies
18.post pictures of our work
19. learn about visual literacy through the design of our pages
20. to have fun!

 

What a great list.  What a great way to start.

Busted!

I’m not as good as Clarence Fisher, who can get kids expelled in another country, but I did feel a bit like Dick Tracy.  

 

A few days ago, one of the students in my classroom received a comment that was not very nice.  It made fun of her writing ability.  In case you are not a regular reader of my six year old students’ blogs, I don’t edit their writing, but instead let it be an online portfolio of their developing ability to write.  The particular child who received the comment has not yet made the connection between sounds and letters in her writing.  

 

Because I use Classblogmeister to host my classroom blog, the comment came to me for approval before it was posted, so I was able to delete it and she was never the wiser.  Her self-esteem is still firmly intact.

 

If it had been one of my students who had written the comment, I would want to know about it.  The student did not have a name that was familiar to me, but I went to the Sitemeter I have posted on my blog.  One of the options is “referrals”.  It gives the URL from which the person linked to my blog.  Since I knew what time the comment arrived in my email, it was easy to check and see where the referral had come from near that time.  I followed the link to another Classblogmeister blog, with the offending student’s name and the teacher’s email address clearly there.  The teacher wrote me back thanking me for the information, saying that she would be “definitely dealing with it”.

 

I am currently blogging with my fifth class of students, and this is the first time I can recall getting a comment from someone outside our classroom that was inappropriate.  A pretty good record, but it is good to know that if I do get something unsuitable for publishing, I can do something about it.