Teaching Students About Blogs
The ABCs of Blogging
Here is a comprehensive interactive tutorial on blogging by and for kids. It is the creation of 5th graders! Below is the instructor’s explanation of this ambitious project and tremendous learning tool. A critical understanding for me is that kids need to be explicitly taught how to use blogs responsibly.
Introduction
This book was written by a group of fifth grade students from J. H. House Elementary school in Conyers, Georgia. I have worked with this group on a weblog project combining a group of ESL students and their native English-speaking classmates. Students developed their abilities as speakers, listeners, readers, writers, and thinkers using weblogs to write about topics of interest to them. You can view the class weblog at http://anvil.gsu.edu/wrinkles.
This book is a way for us to celebrate our learning journey. Students brainstormed words that came to their minds about blogging. Then they added idioms to the list. We had so much fun incorporating them into our writings on our weblogs. See our “Idioms Are Fun” weblog located at http://anned.tblog.com.
I’d like to explain how we came up with the title “Our ABC Blook on Blogging.” One day as everyone was working diligently on our ABC Weblog book, Derrick came up with a great new word. The word is blook. He said we were making an ABC book on blogs so the name should be blook! We all agreed and hence, the creative title.
Anne Davis
Instructional Technology Specialist
Instructional Technology Center
Georgia State University
adavis@gsu.edu
