Literacy Project - Kidblog

I used Kidblog for my literacy project.  My students are blogging with another second grade class in West Hartford.  I found Kidblog to be an easy program to use.  It was easy to set up my class and then link with my former colleagues class.  The students are able to navigate around the blog easily and they can't really do any harm while they are on there.  I have found a couple of posts that they deleted by mistake, but since everything they do is moderated (posts, comments, trash) I was able to retrieve the posts. Some of the students have really gotten excited about blogging and comment from home too. I also am posting "questions of the day" from me based on something that we learned in class.  They have an opportunity to answer the question at home or the next morning on the computers in our classroom.  This is a great way to check in quickly with them to see if they understood what we learned in class.

For my literacy project both classes read and compared Cinderella and Yeh Shen (Chinese version of Cinderella).  The students had to write a post about the stories and state one thing that was the same, one thing that was different, and tell which story they liked best.  Comparing to version of a story is part of the Common Core for second grade (CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.2.9 Compare and contrast two or more versions of the same story (e.g., Cinderella stories) by different authors or from different cultures).  We are waiting to hear back from our blog buddies about what they found to be the same and different when they compared the two stories.

Click on the picture below for a link to our class blog (kidblog.org/mrsmckenziesbloggers/)

Blogging in the computer lab