Bits & Bobs

   It's been a long while since my last blog post here but I have been busy sorting out blogs elsewhere...namely for our school and my class! In September, John Sutton set up a whole school blogging system for us - found here -  and it's been work in progress getting everyone going and sorted. Last week with our school being closed for 4 days due to snow and ice, they really came into their own when each class had work set for them on their own class blogs.

   I love my class blog, I think of it as one of the best tools in my teacher toolkit and it's about to get even better! We've started off slowly as bloggers in Year 3 in that so far it's just been a showcase for work and a tool for me. My class are motivated by having their work showcased online - from writers of the week, to data handling to various art projects -  they love showing their parents, their parents love seeing their work and have left comments to say so. It's enabled me to give them a choice of how to do their PAL (homework) in that we also use the amazing Purplemash from 2 Simple and the choice is either to to their work in their PAL books or on one of the templates within Purplemash. I can then download their work from PM and upload it to our blog. It's given my class the chance to be more creative and expressive about how they do their work - if you look at our blog you'll see many wonderful examples!

   How else do I use our class blog? Well...

• As spelling support - we have a spellings page, a group uses this daily in reading as part of a carousel.
• As maths support - we have a maths page, used both at school and at home.
• For research - it's easy to make a page for topic research that enables my class to reach the sites I want them to access very simply and quickly.
• We have a page that helps parents to understand the methods we use for calculating.
• We have an e-safety page for a constant reminder of the importance of being safe online.
• We've currently got a 'Christmas Fun' page that'll change to a 'normal fun' page in the New Year, with some sites suggested by the children in my class.
• We have a science page which changes with each different topic we do.
• We have a revolver map - this almost teaches the children where in the world continents and countries are without any specific teaching...they love this globe.

  The next stage is to make my class 'users' of their blog. This will allow them to login and write a post - always approved by me first before publishing. I told them about it this week and there was much excitement so I'm going to try to get that all sorted before Christmas. When they become users I'm planning on taking them on a global blogging journey to class blogs around the world to help them understand why we blog. Again it'll be a constant reminder of e-safety when they learn to leave comments on other blogs and in their own blog posts....

  So - we're looking forward to taking blogging a stage further and becoming more global, watch this blog!