Some children feel others have written “mean” comments in their names. They have changed their passwords to try to alleviate problems. Someone recently complained that someone has entered their account again and made a comment using the f word and a word. Another student asks what the a word is. I am getting a little worried that it’s time to close things down for a while. What a shame!

I was looking through the comments of my students and discovered that his grandfather was writing to him. The boy had written about his thoughts on Remembrance Day and his grandfather was writing about his memories of WW II while growing up in Britain. Talk about making connections with those outside of the classroom.

I am glad the kids are sharing their blogs with their family members. They are private to the general public.

I gave the students a choice today. They could write a story about our hamster that had escaped in their journal or on their blog. All but one went immediately for the laptops. The boy who wanted to write in his journal couldn’t find it, so instead of writing on a piece of paper, he powered up the computer.

We are learning to type our posts in Word first and then paste them onto the blog. The computers have been having spinning wheels just as the kids try to save their posts. Using Word is more stable, although one person got stuck when trying to save there too.

I was really excited on Friday. It was like Christmas. One of the district’s mobile lab was delivered. I applied a few weeks ago. I’m looking forward to have less timing restrictions when using the computers. I also was able to borrow a couple of digital cameras and a musical keyboard. There’s even a projector. There are so many possibilities. I think I’ll have the kids use the computers to record themselves reading orally tomorrow. They need practice with oral reading fluency. Perhaps afterwards, others can listen to the recordings while they read along. I also want to start working on an iMovie project. Most of the kids have finished writing a story. I’d like them to publish it using iMovie. We’ve been working on taking weather data and analyzing the cloud types. Tomorrow, I’ll send the students out with the digital cameras to take pictures of the clouds.

We had parent teacher conferences this week. One of the things that came up was the blogs. One of the parents wanted to know what I thought of the process so far. I replied that although everyone was really enjoying them, the responses are not all very educationally sound. That is, the kids use a lot of slang, poor sentence structure, and are using them to socialize. A few are even making play dates at lunch. This certainly wasn’t how I had hoped they be used. Now that most of the class knows how to use them, it’s time to set up criteria so that they can be evaluated. Let’s hope I can focus their responses.