Science Blog Post

We just wrapped up week 2, and students learned how to use several of the digital tools we will be using throughout the year. One of those tools was Kidblog, which is an online blogging platform for students. Kidblog allows students to share their voice with the world, but it also gives teachers and parents a certain amount of control so that we feel comfortable that students are safely contributing to the digital world.

For our first blog post, I had students choose a video on a topic that interested them from the SciShow Kids YouTube Channel. Their challenge was to watch the video and create a blog post that shared what they learned and a question they still had about that topic. Here are the directions I gave them:

I created a blog post as a model for the students, but I also told them that their blog posts could look completely different from my post. I like when they find creative ways to change it up!

You can see that in the directions I included several videos to show students how to complete each step of the directions.

I really liked starting off with a "choose your own topic" sort of blog post. I feel like that helped them get excited about doing it. My students were especially excited about choosing a blog post header image!

We're still in the process of finishing these posts, but they are looking really good and it's giving me a lot of good information about student interests, writing strengths and areas for improvement, and some general information about how well students can work through multi-step directions on their own.

Here are some examples of what they created!

Do you have your students blog in class? I'd love to hear how you using blogging in your classroom!

Comments

First Week of School

We just wrapped up our first week of school! I really enjoyed meeting and getting to know our new 5th grade students! Here are some of the activities we did to start building our classroom culture and learn more about each other: "All About Me" Google Drawing Students learned how to use some of the basic features of Google Drawings by creating a Drawing about themselves. The basic requirements were that they include their name, a picture of themselves, and text/images that describe their personalities or interests. I created an example to give them an idea of what it could look like. I used this activity last year, and I really enjoyed what my students created. However, I decided this year to give them more time to just play with and explore the tools in Google Drawing. I feel like this really paid off because students were able to discover how to use some of the tools and share with each other instead of just relying on me to show them how to use it. ...

#OneNewThing: Adobe Spark

This week I tried using Adobe Spark Video for the first time. I'm enrolled in Tony Vincent's ( @tonyvincent ) Classy Videos course, and our assignment this week was to create a narrated slideshow. When you first log in to Adobe Spark , you can choose which type of product you want to create: I chose to create a video to persuade students and parents to attend our upcoming Back to School Night. Adobe Spark provides some templates for you to use, or you can choose to create your video from scratch. I used the "Promote an Idea" template for my project. Once you have chosen your template, it's time to start creating! There are some basic menus inside of the video creator. These allow you to choose things such as layout, theme, and music. You can also add narration to the slides by pressing the red button with the microphone icon at the bottom of each slide. I wrote up a brief "script" for each slide so that I wouldn't forge...

Differentiating PD - Skill Checklists

In a previous blog post , I shared three areas where I want to improve when designing and leading PD sessions. One of those goals was the following: Try new strategies to differentiate and support individualized progression I want to share one new way I am trying to address this goal in an upcoming PD session for a group of first-year teachers. One of the things I was asked to do in this session was to help teachers learn and practice Google for Workspace skills that they will need in order to effectively plan for the first few weeks of school. As I began to plan for this PD, I reflected on the following challenges: These are brand-new teachers and I don't know what level of Google Workspace skills they already have I want to make sure the learning is meaningful, regardless of their current skill level I do not have enough time to show them everything they might need to know, so I want to leave them with a resource they can revisit when they need it I decided to create leveled ...

Roxi Thompson

Search This Blog