Are you looking for a safe, free to use, advertisement free, easy to manage blog for your primary school students? Kidsblog http://kidblog.org/home.php has ticked many of the boxes for me. I had toiled with the idea of using edublogs, blogger, wordpress, scoilnet blogs and others but this was just so clear cut for the purpose and was separate from the school blog. And what’s more, it can also be accessed on the NCTE schools broadband programme.
While the look of the blog is very simple, it is easy to manage and children grasp the idea very quickly. It’s a perfect introduction to blogging with children. Not only can you have one blog but you can have several blogs within minutes. With one click you can add all your students from one blog to another saving time so you can have many online classroom blogs at the same time using the same members of the class. The ultimate beauty of this blog is it is 100% managed by the teacher. In the control panel the teacher can request that he/she wishes to moderate both comments and posts and can also receive an email verification of this. The administrator/teacher can also edit spelling errors for the child. The administrator can set up individual children to write posts or a group of children. Students can also add photographs, video and audio to their posts which is approved by the teacher before they are finally published. The teacher can also decide how private the blog can be, ranging from student and teacher only access, allowing parents to log-in with a password or the blog can be visible to everyone.
Ideas for using this style of blog include
•helps children with their reading and writing skills e.g. online diary, journals
•Children can easily collaborate on an SESE project publishing posts in groups.
For an example of Kidsblog in use check out http://kidblog.org/pumpkinprojectdiary/