About the Winter Break Blogging Process
My students’ first blogging experience was in the spring of 2006. Those former 4th graders, now 6th graders, will always be able to come back to this site to see how they and their fellow students spent the Spring break of their 4th grade year. The following school year we added 3rd graders to the mix (not all of them, due to other ongoing work at that grade level). Encouraged by that, I decided this year to include everyone in the University School of Nashville Lower School. It’s a grand experiment, and fun as can be.
4th graders go to the site themselves, navigating from the Webliographer, enter their stories, do a quick edit with me before submitting. I must view every post to this blog before “approving” it, at which point it goes “live” in the accessible Comments page. This gives me yet another chance to post-edit, which I do. There still may be an occasional grammatical error or spelling error, though, because in the approval part of the process I’m mainly looking to see if students have followed my directions about content–don’t give any last names, don’t share any addresses or phone numbers, do consider any language that may be offensive to anyone out of bounds (some families, for example, are completely fine with some borderline language, but borderline profanity doesn’t belong in online content that you post for the world audience). With very few exceptions this goes swimmingly!
It’s worthy of note that Mrs. Noel’s class of 4th graders took advantage of their prior personal narrative project and copied and pasted their previous work about Winter Break into the blog comment entry field. This accounts for the contrast in length between her students’ comments and most of the others. Very little editing was performed on these entries.
3rd graders have less time in the lab and are not typing as proficiently yet, so though they also navigate to the data entry field themselves (with a little more help), they do not get finished in the first brief session, at the end of which I tell them to walk away from their work and line up for PE, and then Iroll up and down the rows of computer desks and copy text out of blog comment fields, open notepad, paste text, and save as child’snameblog.txt in the My Documents folder. Next week they’ll come in, type, and finish then we’ll together reverse the process and submit the comment.
2nd graders are also typing their comments, getting an online demo and brief concept introduction like the rest of the grades, but then going to open Notepad to type their entry. That lets me just save in My Documents at the end of their session, and we’ll do the hokey-pokey to post as they finish next week.
1st graders and Kinderkids get a very brief intro then go to their computers to play/explore at Boowa and Kwala while I tap them one at a time for dication. I then do a direct blog comment entry and submit.
There are some interesting insights to glean from reading the final work. One thing that’s impressed me is the wide range of development that becomes apparent through a comparison of grade levels, also even within classes across children. It’s clear who the verbal communicators are, even at the earliest ages. It’s pretty easy to see which 4th graders have been diligent about their keyboarding work, too. Other insights we’ll hope to gain as I dedicate an entire class session in a few weeks to reading the posts and commenting upon them, perhaps in another blog!
