Primary Blogging Community - April edition

I have had a lot of questions pertaining to the Primary Blogging Community.  Hopefully this post will clear up some of the questions for you.

What is the Primary Blogging Community?

The PBC is a community of primary teachers that want to share their students' learning via their classroom blog and their students' personal blogs.  Classrooms will be grouped with 3 or 4 other classrooms from around the globe.  The program is 8 weeks long.  The first 4 weeks will concentrate on the classroom blogs only.  Each week, one of the classes will be the focus class and the other 3 classes will be visiting and commenting on the focus class blog.  The following week, the second class will be the focus class, and so on.   This is a chance for the other classes to see what is happening in your school and class, to discover where in the world you are located and to learn about how to write a good blog post and to watch how you model and work together to write a good comment.  After the first 4 weeks, we switch the focus from your classroom blog and concentrate on student blogs.  The same rotations occur but the focus is solely on your student's individual blogs. 

Why join the Primary Blogging Community?

1.  You will be collaborating with other like minded educators on this project and in return will build your PLN.

2.  PBC creates enthusiasm in reading and writing.

3.  It gives your students a voice and lets them be the teacher to their peers.

4.  Your students will have a built in audience that will provide authentic feedback to what they are writing about on their blogs.
5.  On some days in the last rotation, my students had over 100 comments on their blogs!  The excitement and engagement piece to this blogging community is huge!  

What is the difference between the Primary Blogging Community and Quadblogging?

Quadblogging -  Each week one blog is the focus blog with the other three blogs visiting and commenting during that week. In week two, another school/class blog is the focus with the other three visiting and commenting. This is repeated until each of the classes/schools has had their week in the spotlight. The cycle is then repeated. (from http://quadblogging.net)

Primary Blogging Community - Is the exact same as above except the second 4 week cycle we concentrate on your student's personal blogs, not your classroom blog.

What do I need to have to begin?

You need to have a classroom blog and your students need their own personal blogs.  If you do not have an edmodo account, I highly suggest you sign up for one and join our blogging community.  This is where you can ask questions and collaborate with the other teachers in the group.  The link for our group is here.  The code to our group is 5be0kt.  We also communicate frequently on twitter, use #PrimaryBC on twitter and follow me on twitter for news and updates @mrswideen.

Where do I sign up?

Please fill in the google doc here.

When do we begin?

I will be closing registration September 15 and we will begin September 22nd.