Writing a blog provides a real audience for our children’s creativity. Children love to share their work with family and friends. Most work children create in school is gathered into books that they take home once or twice a year. Blogging offers a faster and more efficient way for children to share their work with genuine, engaged readers. Their work can be valued and appreciated by a much wider audience. Having readers for work is a big motivation. Knowing that real people are reading what they write is a huge boost.
Writing is a higher order thinking skill. Writers need to be capable of combining their thoughts and information into a coherent verbal structure and presentation. By being encouraged to blog, children are exercising this valuable skill in a fun and creative manner that is enjoyable to them.
Blogging is a great way to improve writing skills. Blog posts tend to be short and can be online as soon as they have been written and approved. As soon as your piece is posted, readers will start adding their comments. Children will know when writing is good because there will be positive responses.
Blogs encourage discussion and interaction. Once a post has been approved, teachers, parents and peers can add encouraging comments to the submission. Other readers too (including other pupils in a class) can also submit comments. These can be set to show up on the blog or be seen by the author only after they have been approved as appropriate.
Digital skills are a must for this generation. Learning how to submit work online, do internet research, create documents and multi-media presentations, upload images and generally be comfortable with the web interface is a necessary skill for all young people. They can analyse demographic data about their readers, including the number of visits they receive daily and where in the world their readers live.
We hope you will support and encourage all the work carried out by the class.