The traditional elementary classroom newsletter jumps into the 21st century when teachers write a classroom blog. Teachers can use the blog, or web log, to share student work, communicate classroom news, and post homework assignments. Parents and students can sign in to the blog and be kept up-to-date with all the classroom happenings.
Teachers can involve students in the blog by having them suggest and write daily posts and allowing them to choose photographs and artwork to share with their families. At home students can use the blog to check their assignments, look at the lunch menu, and go to educational websites.
How to Start a Primary Classroom Blog
The teacher can go to a free blogging site, like Blogger, and sign up for an account. The Blogger website takes you step-by-step through the set up process. After the account is created the teacher chooses a name for the blog and picks one of Blogger’s premade templates to fill in with the class’ information.
Customize the Blog with Blogger's Gadgets
Teachers then can personalize their blog by adding classroom information to the header and gadgets to the sidebar. Using Blogger’s gadgets they can write a message to parents from the teacher, add polls and pictures, and link to their favorite educational websites. Teachers can even add an RSS feed with current, relevant primary school articles and an "email me" link for parent questions.
Post Classroom Information for Parents and Students
Once the blog is formatted, teachers can begin to post blog entries. They can post information about upcoming field trips, the day’s homework assignments, and stories of student successes. The month’s school lunch calendar can be linked to the blog from the school website or scanned in by the teacher and added to the blog manually.
Keep Student Information Private
Primary teachers can keep their class news and information private by using Blogger’s settings to disallow search engines from finding the blog and to stop Blogger from adding it to their listings. They can also go into the permissions section and set it up so only those invited to the blog can read it. Teachers can ask parents for their email addresses and email them invites to the classroom blog. The parents create a username and password to sign into the blog so the teacher always knows who is viewing the classroom information.
Primary school teachers can communicate with parents by sharing information in a blog. The blog can be customized using Google’s Blogger and can be password protected so all classroom information remains private. Teachers can print the latest postings weekly for any family that does have internet access. A classroom blog makes home-school communication quick and easy.
Megan Sheakoski - Megan Sheakoski is a teacher, mom and writer whose ideas have been featured in college text books, graduate courses, on websites and on ...
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