Literacy Resources

OK.  You’re thinking about blogging with children and wonder what they might write about.  Well, bloggers write about something that they are interested in and want to discuss with the wider world but I have already covered this.  So what sorts of projects could you do that mean that you could blog for a limited period of time.  I have been  collecting ideas from a wide range of sources for blogging projects:

• School bags project for younger children.  This project was organised by the British Council and involves a link with another school.  Children tell each other about their school and themselves through photographs of their school bags and the contents.  What a great idea.
• Following on from this idea, something similar would be an avatars project where children design and create an avatar and then share why they have made the choices that they have.  This was orignially undertaken as a Voice Thread project but would also work as a blogging project. (I can’t find any links to this project – if you know where it is please let me know so that I can attribute the idea)
• I really like the idea of writing a story section by section on a blog with the readers making comments about what has been written and what is to be written.
• Continuing this idea how about writing the same story from two different points of view, each point of view on its own blog.  Children could do this in pairs and would need very good planning and discussion to enable this to happen effectively.
• Any writing that needs to be chronologically ordered lends itself to being a series of posts on a blog.  How about the journey of a river as a chronological report from source to mouth?  Hyperlinks in this text would really extend the experience for the reader.
• Introducing the children to live blogging.  Unfortunately the links to this idea no longer exist (again if I am wrong let me know) but the idea is to have your class organised into an inner circle and an outer circle.  The inner circle discuss or debate an issue and the outer circle live blog the discussion on their own blogs.  Fantastic for sharing information found about a topic, problem-solving a classroom issue or discussing an issue the children are interested in.  Could this be done at a school council meeting?
• Now this idea is just fantastic.  It was originally designed to be used with mobile phones, but if your school does not allow/encourage children to use mobile phones then it can be done equally well with a teacher blog and pupil blogs.  Film on the Fly. A text message is sent to interested people with a story prompt.  They then film a response on their mobile phones and uploaded it to YouTube or similar hosting site and send in a link.  If your class uses a microblogging site such as Edmodo they could be sent a prompt for a story and could then create the story in any media and host it on their blog, sending you a link.  Liz Kolb suggests running the same type of project only with photos instead of film.  Again, this could be done using blogs instead of mobile phones.
• And this leads nicely into blog carnivals.  Here you send out a theme and bloggers write posts related to the theme and send you a link.  You then write a post that shares the links.  This project works best where you have established blogging links with other schools so that you have a ready audience to join in.  There are loads of carnivals about children’s literature which might be one idea, either to host  or to join in with but there will be many cross-curricular links that you could use for this idea.

This is day 20 of 20 days to better blogging with children. Do you have any time limited projects that could be used with blogging?

This entry was posted on May 12, 2009 at 2:45 pm and is filed under 20 Days to Better Blogging with Children. Tagged: blogging projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.