It is becoming very apparent that one of the biggest benefits of committing time to creating a class blog is to the teachers involved.   The sharing of ideas by the showcasing of class work is a powerful professional learning tool.    The natural way with class blogging is that you seek to develop an audience and most class blogs are read by teachers who have their own blog and are seeking to broaden a network.     I cannot count the number of times I have read or heard, “I saw that on a blog….”, or seen comments written by teachers on blogs “What a great idea, can’t wait to try that with my kids”

Whilst our intentions are student centred, I accept that one powerful by-product of class blogs is the sharing of ideas amongst the adult readers.   Through blogging, teachers are sharing practical ideas and lesson content. Teaching methods are being modelled and exposed in a way that could not occur before the immediate tool of blogging became widespread.   I know that often the teachers are more excited than the students when they receive comments and I credit this to the affirmation that they receive from colleagues.      This affirmation is so important and has been lacking in schools where the doors are closed to outsiders – thankfully those days are over.

Do you have a class blog?  What have you learned from reading other blogs?  What have you gained as a teacher from your class blog?

I was lucky enough to spend some time discussing Contemporary Learning with fellow teachers recently.  One subject was blogging and a teacher from another school described their path towards starting blogging at their school.   A very detailled, inclusive and planned process is underway, where they are engaging students, staff and parents in the process before the creation of their first blog.    Other schools, like mine, had ‘jumped in the deep end’, created blogs, experimented and now very much working on fine-tuning the purposes and goals of our blogs.

I was very impressed with the process of the other school – taking the time to work through the issues and potential and found myself reflecting on our process and, at first, wondering if we had done the right thing.    The schools I am comparing are very different by nature, geographically, physicically and historically.  They are very different as are  their pathways.   In reality, each result will be a reflection of the schools creating them.

After reflection, I returned to being happy with where we are and how we got there.  I will watch the other pathway with great interest and see where it leads them.

Teachers from our school have developed a number of class blogs over the past year.   They have evolved and I have written about this before.  Many benefits have been highlighted and we have had great affirmation.  The class teachers have created great connections with other classes around the world – sharing their learning.   We have partner classes sharing class pets in Australia/New Zealand and Canada, we have QuadBlogging and we have sharing of learning with Chicago students.  

One missing link was the original intention to get the parents involved in the blogs.  Our blogs are windows into the classroom – such a great connection for a parent who can’t pop in and out in a physical sense.   We have had some interest but not as much as we had hoped.

So, in an endeavour to increase this interaction we recently ran a Parent Information Night – We called it a Contemporary Learning Night as we wanted to highlight all practices that are employed within our school whilst we try to use ‘best practice’ in our teaching not just those involving ICT.     The children presented to their parents and told them how they learn – as you can imagine, they had a captivated audience.  Who doesn’t like hearing children speak ?   As a teacher, one thing it is a little easy to forget is that some parents have had little or no contact with school since they were students and we all know that things have changed !

We then opened up for a “exploration” time with our class blogs and parents had an opportunity to acquaint themselves (for some for the first time) with the blogs and more importantly to iron out the mechanics of commenting.   The obstacles of security measures, sign-ins, etc were explained.   They were very keen and excitedly browsed the material and added comments.   

 The question now, is how to maintain this enthusiasm?    We hope that the children’s enthusiasm will rub off and that we have now removed the ‘fear from ignorance’ aspect.    Let’s see …….. step one, done.