Thank you to Kristin Orwig for sharing her adventures of blogging with Kindergarteners. Kristin gave us a great overview of how and why she introduced blogging to her class. If you missed our live session, you can still watch the recording!

Recording of TLP-C Blogging in Primary Grades – January 2015

This was a wonderful introduction to how blogging can be used to give students a chance to share their voices with the world. Kristin shared that she wanted to introduce her students to becoming digital citizens by making their writing public and by learning to comment with each other. She was also interested in having them consider authentic audiences when they wrote. She found that her students loved blogging and she was able to see their writing growth through the blog.

Kristin learned a lot as she began blogging with her kids. Below are some tips she would like to pass along to you:

• Use students’ lunch PIN for a password!
• Get parent and principal permission
• Use #comments4kids to get teachers to comment on your students’ posts
• Check out Matt Gomez’s blog for more ideas: http://mattbgomez.com/
• Use blogging as a center

We also had a great discussion about how to expand blogging across more elementary classrooms and secondary classes as well. Some ideas were:

• Connect a Kindergarten class with a 2nd grade class
• Start with a Blackboard blog to get comfortable with the process first
• Take pictures of students’ writing (and post to blog) to encourage a balance of handwriting and keyboarding

If you have more ideas about how to incorporate blogging in your classes, please share here!