In a comment left here a few weeks ago, thegirlwhopaintedtrees asked “How do you introduce the class blog to your students in the fall?” This was a good question. And since I’ve never introduced a class blog to students in the fall, I directed her to Mark Ahlness, who listed his posts about blogging with his third-graders last year.

Today I took some time to read through Mark’s list (an impressive job of documentation!), and saw several points of commonality with my own experience. I also noticed some new things to think about. In the spirit of contributing to a virtuous circle in education, I want to follow Mark’s lead, and begin a series of posts on the process for developing an online writing community in an elementary school classroom.

Getting elementary kids to publish their work online isn’t as simple as teaching them what a blog is and asking them to write. I’ve said before that there should be a developmental continuum for classroom blogging, but to my knowledge, that information hasn’t been extensively documented. Working with young children requires the teacher to provide specific kinds of support, and also to define learning objectives that are different than they would be with older students.

I don’t claim to have the last word on any of this. This is an exploratory effort. Every classroom is different. My instructional decision making is guided mostly by my own sense of what should happen from day to day. I expect there will be many false starts and changes of course. I’m approaching this like a teacher-research project, documenting my practice and looking for meaningful patterns that I can base some conclusions on. I’d like Borderland readers to question, challenge, and push me to think about questions that matter.

To begin:
There are several immediate needs that we’re working on at the moment. Before students can begin using the classroom website they have to:

  • Return the Appropriate Use form and the Permission to Publish form.
  • Practice keyboarding so they can make reasonable use of computer time in class.
  • Learn to write! uh huh.
  • Manage files in a networked environment.
  • Revise, and conference about their writing.

After getting the forms out of the way, we attack the remaining issues all at once, all year. Rather than go into the specifics now, I’ll elaborate on the list as we go along.