Primary Blogging Community

With the Primary Blogging Community starting this Monday, I wanted to do a little explaining on how this little project has become a bigger project.... At the end of August, I was partaking in my usual Sunday night ritual (participating in #1st chat on Twitter) when the conversation went to blogging.  Many teachers wanted to connect their classrooms with other classrooms from our 1st chat community. I volunteered to do some thinking about it and to start something.  I put out a Google Doc and asked for interested primary teachers to sign up.  The response was fantastic!  There were over 20 primary classrooms that wanted to participate.

I created an Edmodo teacher group for us where we could collaborate on ideas and I could start putting a schedule together.  We decided on the following dates and activities:

Teachers were group with 3 or 4 other classes.

October

Each week one class' blog will be the centre of attention. The other 3 or 4 classrooms will be exploring and commenting on that one particular blog.  The following week, class 2 will be the centre of attention where the other classes will comment and explore on class 2's blog and so on.

November

We are going to do some Skype and Google Hangout sessions with our blogging buddies.  This will create a "face" to the classroom blogs and will enrich the experience.

December

We will do a "snail mail" exchange that we are going to call "Winter Greetings".  Classes will send Winter Greetings to their blogging buddies.  It can be a letter, a card, a picture, or anything that can be sent in the mail. I am hopping that this will be an exciting time for our students and we will see some of their thoughts on their own personal blogs.

January

We will do the same rotation schedule and the same blogging buddies as we did in October, however, this time we will be focusing on our students' personal blogs instead of the class blog.  This will create more comments, more traffic and more enthusiasm for our students' blogs.

I am hoping if all goes well, that we will do the whole process again with different blogging buddies in February.  If you are interested in signing up for the next session, you can sign up here.