At Global2 we like sharing our community’s stories. This week’s guest post is from Mel Cashen.

I am currently a Grade 5/6 Teacher at Lightning Reef Primary School. Easily inspired by others, I am always trying something new, especially around the area of technology in the classroom.

Taken from Captivating Classroom

This week’s challenge in the Global2 Challenge is to reflect on blogging in your classroom. So tonight I took a reflective walk through my class blog and I soon realised the huge journey it has taken since the first post on 27th May 2010;

Welcome to Miss Cashen’s blog. This site will allow you to have all of the wonderful things we do at school at your fingertips – literally! All of the websites, activities and examples of our work will appear on here. So whether you are at home on your netbook or at school in class, you can find all of those wonderful links to work we are doing.

I first began our blog after coming across Kathleen Morris’ class blog and felt that it would be a great tool to bring different links together in one place. It was to be the perfect place to collate what we were working on in class. So 15 months ago that is what I did and boy has it grown!

As I had planned I filled the side bars with links we were using in the class, sorting these into different groups and then using the posts to share the work we had been doing. But the more I used the blog and saw what other’s were doing on theirs, the more I could see the amazing learning opportunities within blogging.

Soon we began to look at how to write a good comment and the power of leaving questions for readers in our posts. And of course the joy of seeing blogging as a reciprocal community where leaving a comment on another blog can earn you a visit in return.

Then we delved into HTML, something I had no idea about before blogging. But this opened the world for the plethora of Web 2.0 tools available to assist in learning.

As the excitement of our first global visitor to leave a comment enthused us, we began to focus on how to write a good post and to look at the blogs we were reading in an evaluative way, learning more about writing a quality post.

Our class blog has not only taught us to be better digital citizens but has given us an opportunity to respond to what we are reading and to write for an authentic audience.

If you were to look at our class blog now you may be thinking we hardly post on it but in fact this is because we have been busy setting up student blogs. Our journey is now about writing posts to interest our readers and build readership. Now we can look even more closely at the community we participate in as bloggers.

I look forward to the next chapter of our blogging journey.