Another 6th grade teaching colleague (who I'll call "Tim") was recently kind enough to do an interview with me via email about his use of Kidblog. His offer to help was especially kind, given he was on vacation with his family! What can I say? I work with a great group of educators and support staff who are always willing to help, no matter what!
Kidblog is a blogging site designed specifically for students. It has a lot of great security features that should put teachers, administrators, and parents at ease when allowing children to use this tool. Tim originally decided to use Kidblog because he wanted to increase collaboration among his 6th grade Social Studies students. Since we teach at an online school, students are allowed to work at their own pace and unfortunately don't always get as many opportunities for group work as their brick-and-mortar counterparts. Tim wanted a way for students to post their writing assignments and multimedia projects online and allow for their classmates to view and leave feedback on those posts. Kidblog allows for just that!
When he was originally evaluating the website and whether it would work for his class, Tim focused on the security of the website, presence of ads, ease of use, and age appropriateness. He decided the site would be appropriate for a wide range of age groups, including 6th grade. He also found the site to be fairly easy to navigate after some practice. Kidblog does allow embedding of videos, podcasts, artwork, Google Docs, and several other. This encourages students to use Web 2.0 sites such as Glogster and Animoto (which are both currently on our school's list of approved external websites) to create multimedia projects. We both agreed that many of our students love using these tools and also showing them to their classmates. We want them to be proud of their work and to show it off, so Kidblog might be the perfect way to do it!
The security features are also something that appealed to both Tim and me. We loved that teachers could create accounts for their students, including a username and password, and the content would only be available to those who were in our class. This eliminates the threat of outside parties viewing the content or attempting to contact students online.
In order to obtain permission to use Kidblog, Tim had to go through our school's official approval process for external websites. He had to explain why he thought the site would be beneficial for teacher and student use and also demonstrate that there were no third party ads or potential problems with cookies on the site. At first, the curriculum department did not want to approve this website because they felt it was "too similar" to our LMS and internal message board, but Tim fought back and explained that our message boards don't allow students to embed multimedia content and the message boards make collaboration difficult because the features are so basic, there are no threaded replies/discussions, and students are not allowed to start their own threads. After further support from a principal, the use of Kidblog was approved.
Tim used Kidblog in a limited capacity this past spring to allow students to share their Ancient Rome projects. He would like to expand its use this coming school year, and I would like to implement it as well. He had a few suggestions for other teachers who might wish to use the site. The first was to assign students their usernames and passwords and to maintain a list with those usernames and passwords in case they forget ("They will!" he joked. "At least one will."). He also recommended creating a tutorial or some kind of usage guide with directions that students and/or parents could refer to if they need a refresher or can't remember how to do something. He also said that some teachers might want to consider moderating student posts and responses (this can be done from the teacher's settings page). This makes it so that before a student's post or reply goes "live," it must be approved by the teacher. He said depending on the age group and the "class dynamics," this might be an appropriate option to eliminate negative or innappropriate comments from students.
After my interview with Tim and researching Kidblog on my own, I am certainly curious enough to consider using it in my classroom next year. I have long lamented the lack of group work and collaboration among students in the online K-12 school setting, and this may be one way to remedy that!
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