Elementary Blogging
Writing for an audience is an important aspect of effective written communication. We should probably be asking ourselves how blogging might serve this purpose at all grade/age levels. In this post, I’ll look specifically at blogging with elementary students.
There are many obvious issues related to blogging with elementary students–personal privacy, content control, copyright and plagiarism, FERPA issues, and so forth. Simply turning elementary students loose to write whatever they want can easily lead to problems. On the other hand, blogging is a perfect tool for writing for an audience. Think of it as the ultimate Writer’s Workshop–post your story, receive comments from readers, and interact with them to improve your writing. What could be better?
The folks at haranbanjo.com have come up with a potential solution for some of the problems. KidzBlog (nice web 2.0 title…) is a blogging tool built especially for elementary students (although it could easily be used with older students). One advantage is that KidzBlog can be housed on a local computer at a school, keeping the blogs “in house” rather than on the public internet. Blogs can also be posted to publicly accessible sites. There is a commenting function that can be turned off once it is set up.
The KidzBlog User Guide explains how the program works, and the KidzBlog Weblog discusses some issues with the program, including pricing. It’s not free.
I’d be interested to hear what you think about this topic…
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