Day 6 of 20 Days to BlogTastic - Our Classroom

Today is Day 6 of 20 Days to BlogTastic and we're focusing on building up our blog posts for the rest of this week.  If you'd like to be involved in this training please click here.

It's important to get your blog into the hands of your students so that their voice and their learning is heard.  This provides them with a sense of ownership and is more likely to get their parents and caregivers on board.  Especially when they hear that their son or daughter made today's blog post.

So how do you do that?  
Well it's not going to happen right away, you do need to setup clear procedures for your students and ensure they understand what good citizenship is and the implications of posting online before you let them create their own posts. 

What are we doing today?
Today's post is all about your classroom.  I got this idea from the 64 Interesting Ideas for Class Blog Posts a crowd sourced document originally created by Tom Barrett.  You can find plenty more here.  If you ever get the chance to work with Tom do it! Truly inspiring!

Photos
Take a few photos of different places in your classroom.  These could be of wall displays, desks or tables, mat areas, library areas, maker spaces basically areas of your classroom. Alternatively focus on one area like an inquiry topic.  

Blog Post
Create a new blog post, add your photos to it and then write a sentence or two about what each space is used for.  Remember to label your post with something like 'Classroom Photos' so you can find it later.

I made a video for Day 3's challenge that explains how to create a new post, it includes details of how to upload photos from your computer, here it is again for reference.

This video explains how to add single photos to a post from Google Drive:

Student Voice
This task now becomes a student job.  Each week/fortnight/month they take new photos to reflect new learning, new spaces in the classroom or to explain further what the current spaces are for.

Depending on how your classroom is setup you might want to sit with the assigned student/s and create the blog post with them.  

If your students have a classroom email address or their own email address you can add them as authors to your blog and then they can sit and make their own posts.  They login to blogger and create a new post the same way you would.  However if they are 'authors' on the blog they can't change any other settings, they can create and delete posts and that's about it.    

Here's a video on how to add your students as authors to your class blog.

Here's a Google Slide Deck that you might like to print and have available to your students it shows them how to create their own blog post, remember they'll need to have author access to be able to do this.

Creating a photo post about your classroom is a great way to keep track of your classroom and how it changes over the course of a term and/or year.  It's also a great way to introduce your wider community to what goes on in your classroom - especially parents and caregivers.

Different photo displays
Here's a little bit extra for those that want to get a few photos onto your blog at once, we'll add more ways to get photos onto your blog throughout the next few weeks..... 

This video explains how to add photos to a Google Slides Document or Slide Deck and then how to upload that document to a blog post.

The great thing about using Google Slides is you can share the slide deck with your students and they can update it, this will automatically be reflected in the slide deck on your blog post.  

If you wanted to you could just copy the code for the slide deck each time you update it and create a new blog post for it.  That way your students only have to update the slide deck and don't actually have to post to the blog. 

Create a post about an area or areas in your classroom, include photos you've taken.  Decide which student/students you're going to give this job to next week and make a plan to train them to take photos over the next few days and then train them on how to create their own blog post next week.  

Remember most students (and teachers) need more than one go with assistance before they learn something, be patient and work to setup this process rather than get it perfect on the first go.

Add a comment to this post with your blog address once you've made the post about an area or areas of your classroom.

Have you completed the challenge?

Remember to update your challenge spreadsheet!  

If you'd like to join the challenge please click here for more information

See you tomorrow!