Parent Information Session on Blogging

1. Parent Information Session on Blogging Thursday 31st March

2. What is a Blog? • A blog is like an online journal • It displays entries in reverse chronological order • A blog entry will often contain text, photos, videos, links to websites or even surveys • Each of the teachers at NGPS have a blog and work hard to maintain it • As of February 2011 there were over 156 million public blogs in existence!

3. Blogs in Video

4. Why Blog? • Blogging is a great way to keep parents up to day with what is happening in the classroom – it provides a virtual window • It helps teach children appropriate online behaviour • Improves literacy skills as children have a real audience to write for • Helps to encourage and strengthen global connections • Improves classroom community and collaboration between children and other classes

5. How to access the blogs • All of the blogs for New Gisborne Primary School can be accessed through our school website: http://www.newgisps.vic.edu.au/

6. Parents and Blogging • This is our main aim this year and the reason we have decided to run this information session • According to research when it comes to social networking; apparently 90% of readers never contribute, 9% contribute a little and 1% contribute a lot • Statistics taken from http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html

7. How do we get parents involved in blogging? • Our aim is to get parents involved with blogging by leaving comments on their child’s blog site • The following dot points may help and encourage you to visit the blog sites regularly: • Bookmark school website and or blog site on favourites http://www.newgisps.vic.edu.au • Subscribe to blogs http://hunichenhollands.global2.vic.edu.au/

8. How to leave a comment • Find the post you would like to leave a comment on

9. How to leave a comment – Part 2 • Click on the comment link (as shown in the previous slide) • The screen you will see is like the one on the right

10. Leaving Quality Comments By “quality comments” we mean: • writing the comment like a letter (greeting, body, closing, signature) • using correct spelling, punctuation and spacing, • reading over the comment and editing before submitting, • complimenting the writer in a specific way, asking a question, and/or adding new information to the post, • writing a relevant comment that is related to the post, • not revealing personal information in your comment. We really want to limit the “I like your blog!!!” or “1B is cool” type comments

11. Example Comments

12. Final Tips and Hints • http://vimeo.com/15695021 • One more tip! Don’t lose your comment. Copy (Control C), comments before you hit “submit”. This allows you to paste (Control V) the comment if something goes wrong when you hit the “submit” button. This happens fairly frequently with young students due to the wrong spam word being entered etc. • Comments won’t appear on the blog straight away, they go to the administrator of the blog for moderation and approval.

13. Comment Resources • This is probably the most comprehensive website to help you learn about blogging. http://theedublogger.com/ • This website discusses the educational benefits of blogging. http://primarytech.global2.vic.edu.au/information-about-educational-blogging/ • The following website gives a good overview on commenting. http://2kmand2kj.global2.vic.edu.au/learn-about-blogging/how-to-comment/