When considering the thought, "How could I use a blog in my classroom?"many thoughts came to mind. I could use it to post valuable news and bulletins to my parents. For example the all important, "Please write your child's name inside their clothes," would be a common occurrence. Reminding them to check the weekly bag for important information on the latest flash cards or school event could be valuable to my parents. No doubt there would be a few post about these things, but I think even with kindergarten I could use it for more.
My next thought it could be a place to display students' work. I could take snap shots of their work (leaving off their name of course) and putting encouraging remarks, like "Look at those finger spaces!" Give parent opportunities to post replies to posted questions with the assistance of their child. For example, "Work with your child to create a sentence that includes the high frequency words go, have and we." Again, these would be great post and no doubt would they occur on occasion, but I thought there has to be more that I can do for my kindergartners in these post.
Then it hit me! I could us a blog to help my students by helping their parents. Many parents in kindergarten are afraid of helping their children because they simply do not know how to help them. Others are afraid that they are going to teach something wrong, use different vocabulary, or give the directions in a different order. They do not want to confuse them so they do nothing at all. A blog could be a place where I explain how to help their children. Explain the vocabulary we use in our math and language arts programs. Explain the steps to blending and segmenting a word. Use student work to give examples of what we are looking for in their child's work. This would be the most useful way to use a blog in my classroom. Of course, I could add in different posts about congratulating students or reminding parents that flip-flops are not appropriate footwear for school. Most importantly, however, I can help parents help their students learn.
This is such a great idea for a blog! Being a high school teacher, I have never had to think about how a Kindergarten teacher would effectively use a blog, but in the few minutes I pondered the question before reading your post, I came up with nothing and felt so enlightened after reading your plan. This will certainly be beneficial tool for parents and could have even greater possibilities than merely posting your recommendations for how parents can help their children improve their school performance. Your blog can be a networking site for parents, where they will not only receive your insights, but also the insights from other parents as they comment on your posts. In addition, parents will be able to establish bonds and friendships with one another which will be a huge benefit as these children will be attending school together for the next twelve years. Getting parents involved in their child’s education starting with Kindergarten will only help the students as they continue on in school. An involved parent is very important for the development of a child and through this method parental involvement will be both easy and fun. Great idea!!!
ReplyDeleteYou make an excellent point about connecting parents. Other parents are an awesome support system. It is alway beneficial to know the families of the children your child is spending time with. It, also, always helps to have someone to help you out in pinch. You never know when you will need someone to pick up your child or drop them off to school. Thanks for the insight!
DeleteFirst of all, compliments on the design of your blog site. I love the colors, which inspire creative solutions to discussion topics. Since I am new to blogging, I was wondering how to point out challenges you might face with the way you want to implement blogging in kindergarten, let alone make a recommendation for its better use. Quite a funny situation, but I did a bit of research from our course text, "Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts" and Richardson makes some very good suggestions, which in support of your topic, which I thought would enhance the use of blogs in your class (Richardson, 2010).
ReplyDeleteI like your title because it indicates that your students are not at the stage where they can communicate in text, so your options are either to communicate with the parents, or to have your students communicate in a way that best expresses their stage of learning, as you plan to do. Thankfully, the options on today's blog sites allow us to upload pictures and video clips with ease, allowing parents to see how their children are learning.
My school has an online weekly newsletter and just recently started using an online curriculum manager for students, parents and teachers to communicate information regarding student progress and performance, as well as a schedule of events and a message board for posting questions and homework. It has been a slower start for parents than for students. So one challenge I see is the process of coaching your parents to blog. So as Richardson says, "start small" and use the blog at first as an information board of calendar events and put in weekly pictures of students' work (Richardson, 2010). Make sure there is a picture of each student representing the entire class, so no one is left out. Or choose a "student of the week" to be show cased on the blog. This could encourage the student to produce a quality product, since a real audience would be viewing this.
Once your parents are regular users, and they will be if their children are presented on the site, then you can use the blog site for the purpose of helping the parents help their children learn.
Although I am not an expert blogger, I hope this helps you in some way to enhance kindergarten blogging. And in return, you could give me a suggestion for my classroom blogging.
Alexi
Reference
Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful Web tools for classrooms.(3rd Ed) Thousand Oaks, CA. Corwin
Thank you very much for your insight! Sometime I forget how crazy life is for parents that it would be important to give them each a reason to view my blog in the first place. It was not something I thought about. Your insight was very useful. Thank you!
DeleteI love the ideas that you have. I think that a lot of them are going to really help your parents to be more involved. Now, the assignment is for us to see any challenges that you may face. I might be concerned that even with the examples, the parents may muddle your teaching a bit. I know that as a parent, I always go back to "Well, when I was in school,...." when I try to help my daughter. Even as a teacher, and I know that things have changed majorly since I was in school. I would just be cautious that the parents aren't undoing your work and confusing children even more. I think that you are going to be able to be successful with just a few tweaks here and there!!! Great job!!
ReplyDeleteThank you for your insight. I think that helping parents see how we do things today would help a little with the muddling that I see already, but I definitely see your point. Many things are taught differently today then they were when I was in school. Thanks again to your comment!
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