Rationale for student blogs:- To give students a platform to connect, communicate and collaborate with an authentic audience that includes students, teachers, parents, local community and a global community.
Blogging is a tool that allows students to make their work look good, shows what they have learned and achieved, gives voice to their ideas and opinions, provides a space for journal entries, allows an area for reflection and a platform for digital portfolios. (See my 20 reasons for students to blog post)
To create student blogs, the following essential content and topics will be covered in my classes.
- Appropriate user names, passwords and blog url
- Writing posts and pages
- Using the dashboard and managing posts
- How to categorise and tag post entries (for personal and search engine purposes)
- How to write reflective and descriptive journal entries
- Appropriate content for school based online blogs
- How to instigate and maintain conversations, using comments
- How to comment appropriately on blog posts, email thank you replies to people who comment on their blogs
- Appropriate behaviours including plagiarism, cyber safety and digital citizenship
- The use of widgets in the sidebar eg website links, categories, clustrmaps, feedjit,
- How to use their blog for reflective purposes.
- How to insert images
- Resizing images using eg irfanview etc
Worthwhile content
- Introduce various web2.0 tools to give an attractive appearance and rich content eg toondoo, wordle, slideshare etc
- How to use and create avatars, vokis etc
- How to add hyperlinks
- Addition of further widgets for effect eg weather pixie, flag counters etc
- How to embed web2.0 tools by using the resultant code
- Work that reflects their own personal identity and learning styles
- How to add or link multimedia content including podcasts, digital stories and movies
- How to add MS Powerpoint using slideshare and other MS Office docs (for PC schools) etc
See also “Features of a good quality student blog“