Kid Blogs Follow Up

In my last post I mentioned that it would be hard to integrate blogs the way I had envisioned with Kid Blogs. In his comments, Joshua asked for clarification to see if I could explain more about that statement. My desire to integrate blogs into my classroom stemmed from the concept that came up over and over as I have been reading a variety of resources to help me teach in a writing workshop setting - the importance of having students write for authentic purposes. At one point in time I realized that my new blogging hobby would be relevant for students - a form of writing that "real" writers do.

I envisioned my students blogging for a variety of reasons, such as book reviews and slice of life stories. My own blog that I set up for blog reviews was a pattern for how I would have students use them. Tagging allowed for easily indexing different types of posts, such as including author's names and/or genres. I also love being able to have the image on the side bar that people can click on linking back to a post with a running list of books by author and title that I read by year with a link to the actual review post. These were the features that I was talking about that are not possible via Kid Blogs. I quickly realized that other differences, such as only having two choices for backgrounds, which I originally thought was off-putting, were not really that big of a deal and aspects that would not keep me from utilizing the platform.

For 6th and 7th graders who I had originally not planned on blogging until their 8th grade year, Kid Blogs would be a great introduction to blogging. Once I realized that Google Sites, which is already a part of our Google Apps Education edition would probably meet our needs, I decided to go that route so that students could access all their services from one site (email, documents, and sites).

Even though I decided against Kid Blogs (for now at least), there was a lot that I thought was great about the service:

• As the site says, it was very easy to set-up and is free.
• It has privacy control options that are ideal providing flexibility for schools and families to decide on what would be the best fit for their children, such as access to all visitors, class members and logged-in guests (such as parents), class members only, or teacher only. 
• Students do not need to have email addresses to blog. 
• When I created my class' blogs it automatically created a blog directory on all of my students blogs on the right hand side bar of my site. 
• I was going to be able to have a separate blog for each class, and there was a drop down menu option on the top of the screen to easily navigate among the classes.  

When I thought about using Kid Blogs, I imagined it would be a great location for recording books read. Since I would not be able to use tags and the side bar link to a running list like I do on my blog, I thought that I would just have students type the number before the title so that students would have an easy way to know how many books they read in a school year. It would not be as easy for them and other students to navigate among all of their posts, but it would still be functional. Students would be able to view each others' pages and leave comments. In fact, the simplicity that I was a bit disappointed in for older students is probably ideal as an introduction to blogging for younger students.

Joshua mentioned that his blogging goals are to "provide a nice hook to get my students to express their opinions more frequently and interact with each others' ideas. [...] It seems like an effective platform for book logging/reviews. Finally, I'm considering using it as a way to communicate to parents more about what we are doing in class." He wondered if Kid Blogs seemed to be a good fit for this for his 4/5 classroom. I would say that of the different platforms I have considered and am aware of, Kid Blogs probably is an ideal option for the age range of his class. By knowing the site for the teacher's page on Kid Blogs, parents could learn about what was happening in class and have access to the links to their child's blog, as well as their classmates.