Launching a Class Blog

It sounds like a big deal, but it's not.

It sounds like it'll require a ton of new skills to learn, but it won't.

Every class I walk past is already doing a pile of things that could very easily move on to a class blog, meaning the habits & behaviours to support it already exist.

The key things to remember before you even begin to think about the tools & techniques are the simple ones that come naturally to us as educators.

People, and communication.

With that as our focus, where to begin?  The platform's easy - both major blog platforms (Blogger and Wordpress) work more or less the same way, and they're free to join.  If you've ever written text on a computer before, you've already learned the controls.  We can catch up after school early in the term and lock it down in a few minutes.  We'll look at organisation in a minute, but let's look at the more important part first.

People.

This blog can become the online extension of your classroom.  It has the power to eliminate that single most frustrating conversation between children and their parents - "what did you do at school today?" "...nothing."
It's a place where you can document classroom activity, and share ideas & resources with your students.  It's also (and probably more importantly) somewhere to allow students to interact online.  This is important because they are going to interact online anyway.  If their first experience of it is lying about their age around Year 4 to create a Facebook account, we've all seen how well that usually turns out.
What if their first experience of it was documenting a science project in Kindy?  A wise voice guiding how they word their posts together?  An actual face-to-face conversation about how to choose photos to accompany the post?  Photos that show what they'd created, rather than just what the kids themselves look like?  Opportunities to share their own little voices, but in a supervised, moderated way that contributes to an online community that's very deliberately positive, constructive, and purposeful?  How are those children going to approach independent online activity as they get older?  Will they be as hot-headed and haphazard as the first group of kids I described?

This is where they need structure and guidance.  Being social and interactive in electronic places is 99.9% ethics, critical thinking & social skills.  What's left is the technology.  Ignore it, it gets easier to use all the time.  This post here by educator Kim Cofino when she was the Digital Literacies Facilitator at the International School of Bangkok is a brilliant starting point for some guidelines for blog use in schools - both for posting and commenting.  Take it, share it, tip your hat to Kim, and modify it to best suit your school and your class.

Communication.

Think about the amount of communication you do daily.  Communication with your students - verbally, visually, and through sharing.  Communication with parents.  Pragmatic stuff, purpose-driven stuff, interesting stuff, fun stuff.  Why not bring that all to one central channel?  Organise what you post into little categories to keep it neat, but otherwise it's a one-stop shop.  It'll time and date stamp everything for you, which makes record keeping much easier.

The best place to begin is to decide on how you want the people around you to communicate.  Pick something that you can do by habit.  Maybe you'll post your class plan for the following day with relevant materials linked every afternoon so kids and parents can be prepared every day.  Maybe you'll take some time at the end of every week to reflect on what you've learned as a class.  Maybe you'll share & follow an important news story each week, and open it to discussion.
Also pick a project to document.  Something that can evolve over time, and that will benefit from being visible.  Growing something in science?  Building something in Art?  Shaping & forming narrative?

At the end of the day, what this can do for you is make the learning in your class visible, enable communication & collaboration, and save you time.  The trick is using it to replace things you're already doing, rather than add them on top.