It is the first month of school and my 5 and 6 year old students posted their first blogs today (09/20). We are using the site classblogmeister.com and I thought that I would share with you some information about the site and my thoughts and opinion about it.
Classblogmeister is a free site for Educators that was created and developed by David Warlick, an Educator who operates the Landmark Project, which is a consulting and innovations firm in the USA . His passion for literacy and education is what drove him to create this site for educators.
It is a very secure site that allows the teacher to moderate and approve all posts as well as comments. It is fairly easy to navigate and within a framework allows you to personalize the page by choosing colours and adding pictures, clip art, widgets and other media.
I began using it last February after taking part one of the I.T. course. In my internet travels, I had come across the blog site of Kathy Cassidy and was (and still am) amazed by what her grade one students were doing in Saskatchewan. http://classblogmeister.com/blog.phpblogger_id=1337 What really amazed me about Kathy's site was the readership. She has 89 countries on her "clustrmap" and has had 109866 hits since 2006. It inspired me to think that my grade one students could put their message out to the world and get responses! Wow - how powerful! Nothing can motivate a beginning writer more than to see the number of reads on your blog and to receive comments to your work - and from more than your teacher.
Classblogmeister is a very secure site that allows the teacher to moderate and approve all posts as well as comments. It is fairly easy to navigate and within a framework allows you to personalize the page by choosing colours, adding pictures, clip art, widgets and other media. Initially, you must get a school number from David Warlick through email to set up your blog but once you have that, you can work at creating your site. There is a pdf that contains tips and tricks for creating and maintaining your blog and you can also get technical support through a forum on the site. Personally, I found the pdf and tips somewhat helpful but really, it came down to playing with it myself and just figuring things out.
Last Saturday night about 10:30pm, I posted a couple of videos on the site and when I got up in the morning, there had already been 83 views! By Monday morning we were at about 150 and tonight as I write this there have been 534! We even have a few comments. The kids are burning with excitement and enthusiasm and want to blog on their pages. Right now, I feel my hopes for my emerging writers beginning to bloom. Through this web 2.0 tool, I can see the current skill level of my students and plan for future lessons based on this evidence. What a fabulous artifact (one of many forms, of course) of their writing growth that this will be as the year progresses - and one that their parents can view at any time and anywhere. What a wonderful living portfolio and a means to communicate to parents about what happens in "The Cardinal's Nest".
If you'd like to check out our blog, please click the link to The Cardinal's Nest
T.B.
