Duration: 1:30
Blogs make a versatile communication tool. James Rea, DP at Russell Street School, shares how students are using their library blog to post book reviews and character profiles. He explains that the teacher gives students responsibility for the blog while the teacher's role is to monitor.
So some examples of using the blogs as a communication tool - we’ve got one of our teachers not very familiar with technology, was a bit shy about it, and part of my work with him in leadership was, you know, to get him to hand it over to the students who were very capable senior kids in the school. You know, just monitor it rather than be the person doing it all the time and so he setup a green team and they had a separate part of the blog and that was to promote recycling and renewable energy, switching off the lights. They put surveys on there. They put information on there. So it was a great way to communicate within the school so that their community was the school community.
Again the library blog is another one that’s very good within the school community - surveys, quizzes. The children go off and work with a librarian and they create book reviews. And, we had a whole part where the children built up characters and they competed against each other so you had The Cat in the Hat versus Greedy Cat. And, they built up a profile of these characters with their work with the librarian and then they’d post it up. They’d come to the assemblies and they’d promote it to the children and say, “Who’s going to win if they had a battle?” It was a great way to use the blogs to engage others in learning.