Room 3’s Blog

Hello,
I decided to copy this comment and put it as a post so that you could all read it. You could start visiting their blogs and leaving comments as soon as you read this. I will add this link to our blogroll for easy access for you. Remember our blogging rules when you are leaving comments.

My 8th grade team(13-14 yr olds) is looking for some “blogging buddies.” We would like to exchange links to one another’s blogs and exchange comments. Our class blog is www.pbogush.edublogs.org and the kid’s blogs are linked on the right. The two classes that would be involved would be Ruby and Sapphire. I enjoyed checking out your student’s posts and loved some of the questions they reflected on.
Thanks,
Paul Bogush

Today we set up all the students in the class`with a Bloglines account so that they could more easily manage and keep track of comments to their own blogs and new posts on the class`and others blogs. This was a surprisingly easy process as all students either have their own email account (hotmail) or were able to use their school email.

Why did I choose Bloglines rather than Google Reader? Although I use both myself (still undecided which is more suitable) I think that Bloglines is easy for those new to managing feeds. It’s an easy registration process and its also easy to save posts and comments plus students didn’t need to open a new email account.

I’m going to try and track their use of their feed reader over the next couple of weeks but I did notice that a few spent their lunch time adding more blogs to their feeds.

Next year I will set a feed reader up at the start of the year when new students begin their blogs, along with setting up hit counters and cluster maps. Both counters and cluster maps are a must for student blogs so that they can see their blogs are being read even if comments aren’t always left.

BTW I have started adding student blogs on the sidebar of this blog and would love it if you can alert me to any others so that we can extend our conversations to students worldwide.