This post is for teachers who are taking the class with me!

My students have great plans for our classroom blog.  In fact, they have 29 different ideas of what they would like to see me do on this blog.  I'm not 100% positive if this particular blog will be able to handle all of their requests or not. They did have some pretty interesting ideas that I wouldn't have ever come up with on my own.  They range from "The Best Book I Ever Read" to "At home Science Experiment of the Week"  to about a million different versions of "Student of the Week". 

The article I read, "Blogging as a Means of Crafting Writing," by Lacina and Griffith,  had some very practical tips for teachers just getting started with their classroom blogs.  The very first one was BABY STEPS.  I will need to keep remembering that.  Hopefully, by the end of the year we will be at a place where we have several of their ideas up and running.  The rest of the article really talked about how to model effective writing using blogs.  That's one of the biggest frustrations I have had with blogs.  Sometimes the posts students make aren't exactly what we as teachers want to see.  The article goes through step by step how to teach students to be effective digital citizens. I plan on using it's advice as we work on this blog.   (If you are one of my 6th graders reading this - that means that we're going to be working on how to write a good blog post.)

Here is a link to the article:  http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.www.remote.uwosh.edu/doi/10.1002/TRTR.01128/pdf

Lacina, J., & Griffith, R. (2012). Blogging as a Means of Crafting Writing. Reading Teacher, 66(4), 316-320. doi:10.1002/TRTR.01128