We Are Ready to Share with the World!

We have been learning about blogs and blogging and how to be safe on the Internet!  The first thing we did was talk about safety and citizenship while on the Internet.  We watched a video from Garfield's Learning Lab and learned what type of information we DON'T want to post on the internet.  Then we made a poster sharing this information.    We learned to follow Garfield's YAPPY rules.  Don't share:
Your full name
Address
Phone number
Passwords
Your plans
while online.  We constantly go back to these rules while working with technology.

Next, we looked at lots of different blogs to see how they were designed.  We discovered that all blogs have many features in common; they have a title, a place to  write a post, make a comment and reply to comments. Some blogs have what is called a blog roll - if you click on the blog roll it will take you to another person's or class blog.  Next, we designed a paper blog so we could practice the skills we had learned (this idea was not my own but one I found while on Twitter so thank you to Matt Callison for sharing your idea with the world!).  We had to decide on a title for our blog and include the important parts of a blog.
 
After we had designed our blog we learned how to write a quality post.  We wrote our ideas down on a chart so we can refer to it while we write about our learning and share it with the world.

 All of our paper blogs have a title, a link for All logs and the name of the person whose blog it is.
On the right hand side is the blog roll.

We practiced writing a post and including an image to go with our post. Once we had finished writing our post, Mrs. Betts handed out our blogs randomly and we had to read the post and make a comment about it following the criteria on the chart, "How to Make a Comment".  Once we had finished our comment we handed it back to the person it belonged to so they could write a reply.

This was a very worthwhile project that helped us learn and practice the skills necessary to read, write and respond to people's writing on their blogs. 

Finally, after practicing all these skills on paper we were ready to share our thinking and writing with the world!  We are now connecting with the world through our individual blogs as well as our class blog!  It is so much fun and much more powerful writing for a wider audience than just for one person (no offense Mrs. Betts!)  Please visit our individual blogs and leave us comments.  We LOVE hearing from you!

Are you blogging at your school?  If you are visit us and let us know and we will connect with you.  If you aren't blogging yet, give it a try!