Classroom Blogs

Yesterday my teaching partner and I embarked on our classroom blog journey. Sitting side by side in the computer lab, we bounced ideas off each other as we got started. We did not get too far. It was the first really hot summer day so far (around 105), and the heat seemed to shorten the amount of time we could focus on trying to navigate something new. We did accomplish setting up our own edublogs, choosing a template, and starting to familiarize ourselves with how edublogs work.

Since I am familiar with Blogger, it will take a little bit of time to switch over to the Wordpress framework that Edublogs uses. At least many common concepts transfer, and Wordpress is not completely foreign since some of my favorite blogs use Wordpress. My first mix-up was that I thought that I could create multiple pages with posts on each one. I learned quickly the true intent of pages, and verified it before deleting my pages that I had created for each subject area. I will have to rethink just how I want to format my classroom blog.

As soon as my classroom is complete, I am going to change the generic picture on the classroom header to one from my room. I also need to think about which posts I want to add to my site first. I already started drafting my great sentences posts in English and Spanish, but I will leave them unpublished until I introduce the concept to students. For now I am thinking of drafting up a Welcome post that I will leave up as the sole post until the year is underway and to demonstrate to parents at our parent meeting a few nights before the first day of school.