This post is because I had already reviewed the blog below before I decided to do my seocnd post on teacher blogs. I still wanted to share my review on this classroom blog.
As a high school math teacher I have never considered the idea of blogging and prior to the course I am taking had never looked at a blog other than a local news blog. I must say I am very impressed and I have to incorporate blogging into my classroom. These teachers are amazing and clearly their students love blogging!
One of the classroom blogs I visited was 4KJ@Leopold, an elementary classroom blog. Miss Kelly Jordan is a fourth grade teacher at Leopold Primary School in Victoria, Australia and blogging is a major part of her classroom. The blog immediately caught my attention because I loved the yellow background and the pictures across the top. She just recently had a contest for August, titled Family Blogging Month. Miss Jordan stresses the importance of family involvement by saying, “it makes everything we do at school more meaningful and special.” This is true, how awesome is it that family members are getting to read about what is going on in school and sharing their thoughts, asking questions, and participating in the learning. She made up a code for each family member so that the students could keep a log of who was commenting on their behalf. Her recent post on September 2nd announced the winner, Jessica. Congrats to Jessica! Miss Jordan’s blog had over 120 comments from family and friends of the students during the month of August, what a great way for the families to get involved. The hope is that this involvement will continue. Miss Jordan also recently made a post, what do you like to read? I was interested in viewing this post because I wanted to view the comments that people had left. I was so happy to find that parents and other family members and friends had contributed with comments about their favorite childhood books. When the students see that their family members loved a particular author or book they are more likely to want to read the book.
Miss Jordan’s blog has several tabs at the top of the page and one that I was interested in was global projects. Global projects are projects the students work on with their blogging buddies around the world. One project Miss Jordan’s class did was called the monster project and was completed with Mr. Avery’s sixth grade students in Massachusetts. A student in Miss Jordan’s class was paired up with a student in Mr. Avery’s class and they each had to draw a picture of a monster. They then wrote a detailed description of their monster which they shared with their partner. Their partner had to use their description and try to draw their monster. At the end they compared their drawings and learned how important it is to be very descriptive in their writing. I was very excited to read about the project and wished that when I was in fourth grade I had Miss Jordan.
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