Personal and community blogs
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The DB blog feature is a perfect introduction to online communication as it organically encourages pupils’ enthusiasm for writing, reading and peer assessment. Whether your class is using personal, class or public blogs, DB Primary allows free reign for creative writing and response within a secure environment that is fully integrated with the DB profanity filter and reporting features.
Each child has their own personal blog and these can be easily accessed from account homepages. The straightforward design enables pupils to navigate around their blog space with ease. Pupils can choose from a range of creative input tools to add to their blog. Blogging tools include text, paint, video and audio recording.
Once they have written a personal blog, the children have the option to publish the blog post to their class’ community page (which will need to be approved by the community leader).
Encouraging the children to write their own blog entries opens up discussion for key teaching points around their digital footprint, online reputation and sharing of personal information.
The children can also visit each other’s blogs (if you have the ‘members’ option available on your community menu) and leave each other comments. Blog posts and comments are all fully integrated with DB Primary’s profanity filter and the use of any blocked word will stop the post or comment being published.
Your class’ community blog is a great place to document the learning going on in your classroom. To ease workload, write a weekly blog entry with your children during class time. Use it as an opportunity to create a shared piece of writing that one child is then in charge of typing up onto the class blog. This means you only need one computer but all the children in your class have hands-on experience with creating content to be published online. Encourage the children to then add their own thoughts and comments on each blog entry, emphasising the importance of sharing their ideas in a polite and respectful way.
Some task ideas to get you started:
- Keep a class blog for a half term. Each week get the class together to take part in a shared writing activity. Take photos of the children’s learning throughout the week and ask the children to help decide which photos should be included in the weekly blog.
- Split the children into groups and ask them to work together to write a short entry for the blog. One group could focus on what they’ve been learning in maths, another group could write about their Literacy lessons and another about their topic lessons.
- Ask the children to create a personal blog entry recounting their weekend or half term.
- Set the children the task of writing a blog entry about a recent school trip on their own personal blogs. Ask them to publish their entries to the class blog and tell them that you will choose the best ones will be approved and shared on the class blog.