Today in our staff session I looked at a blog and the benefits of having a blog. I looked at Simon Scott's Blog. He is a Deputy Principal at Hornby Primary School. He discussed that as part of his learning journey with Manaiakalani he assigned his students the task of creating a blog for their learning journey. He said that it was exciting to see the high levels in engagement with the children as they were sharing their knowledge with their peers via their blogs.A focus for him was teaching the children to comment on other peoples posts. To do this the children followed the following criteria:
He stated that "following this template it has stopped children from giving shallow feedback like 'Good work', 'Awesome, well done!'. Their comments now are full of advice or questions that promote further learning or initiate a learning conversation. But the biggest impact to the students learning has been the improvement of punctuation in their writing. This has been transformational! Through the combination of the 3 steps to writing a comment and having an authentic audience the children's punctuation has improved out of sight. "
When reflecting on my classroom environment I do not feel that teaching the children to have their own blog will be beneficial. Due to the age group this will be a struggle to monitor and teach the children. However I like the idea of the 'Positive, Thoughtful and Helpful Feedback.' This is something that I could teach the children to do after following a learning experience, whether this is Writing, Reading, Mathematics, Performing Art, etc. This could be done verbally to help the children develop the ability to listen and accept feedback from their peers.
