This blog is my first attempt at a blog and I am still working on figuring out all that goes into a blog and exactly how to use a blog. Early this year, I entered my class in a blogging challenge. I forgot that I had entered us into the challenge until we started getting hits to our blog from the challenge website. The challenge is all about teaching our students to be better bloggers! What a great concept because the reason we use blogs in the classroom is the help students understand that we are part of a global community and to really harness the power of Web 2.0 – the collaboration web. I want my students to understand how to blog and why blogging is important. Blogging isn’t important just to say that we have technology in our classroom, it is a discussion starter! So the blog challenge is teaching students how to make their blogging a discussion and how to harness all the power we have in the internet into our posts and make them more interesting and promote discussion.
The challenge for week 5 was to have students insert links and pictures into their comments. I must confess, I am still a little confused on this part. It took me a bit to understand that when commenting on a blog post the students couldn’t just hyperlink, they actually had to write html code to insert the link! I love the idea of the students learning html in fifth-grade, but I must admit my fifth-graders are having a difficult time figuring it all out.
I also told they students in my original post that they had to insert a picture into their comment. I am still working on this issue but now I am learning that inserting pictures into a comment may not be possible. In the original post students may put pictures but I am still researching if students can put pictures in a comment. If you know the answer would you please pass it along? I had to go in and edit my post to my students and remove the picture portion of their blog requirement this week because I am still trying to figure pictures out!
I am sure that I will make many more mistakes with regards to our class blog, but I am having so much fun learning about how to have my students effectively blog! My students love being part of the web and web based discussions. Their writing skills are improving, the only thing missing is a true debate or discussion. Maybe that will be my focus next!
