What a great afternoon we have had – we had an ICT lesson in which I was aiming for the children to get the opportunity to blog and comment using the class blog. I had already explained about their login details and made some small laminated cards that had this info on (I used a combination of Excel and Word/mail merge) and a small paragraph about how to add a post.
As a starter for the session we wrote some rules together as a class about writing on the blog – I did this straight into the class blog and posted it immmediately. As I was writing I was able to demonstrate and highlight what I was doing; I clearly modelled the editing stage as I read everything through very carefully and made any alterations – only then did I click on publish.
We read what I had written on the blog about our first post and checked we understood the task. The children then went to the suite and working in pairs created a post each and a comment.
I found a computer to use and as the children posted I checked and moderated as best I could before approving. I think that this will be an important stage to, in the future, to not worry too much about. I would prefer them to develop a strong habitual care for what they write. As a teaching point back in class when we reviewed our work – I commented that you may find some small spelling mistakes in the posts. I said that we have to understand the variety of people who may read our work – from parents to other headteachers and children in schools in a different country. So we have to be proud about what we create. We have to take care and check the accuracy of what we do.
If regular blogging has such an impact then it would be a major change in the writing behaviour of my children.
