Community reviews for Fanschool

Kidblog is an excellent resource to provide an authentic audience for published thoughts and activities. Students young (K) and older (8) can create pages with ease. It provides a learning environment where students are able to express their thoughts and share with others.

I tried different blog sites with my literature classes. I found Kidblog to be the easiest to use and set up. It was free for my purposes. Once set up, the students can be given the link to the blog and log in by choosing their name. All they have to remember is their password. We had a little trouble getting the pictures to go into the posts at first, but I think that glitch has either been fixed or we got better at it because it has not been a problem the last time we used it. Every once in awhile a post would not save. But I think it may have been user error rather than a problem with the website.

This is another opportunity that I think that all teachers should try to do with their students. With all of the standardized testing being online next year, children need more authentic learning experiences with technology. This is the perfect platform.

1) Students will improve their writing skills more quickly because they now have an immediate audience for their work, an audience that goes beyond the walls of their classroom, connecting them to other students in their grade level at school. This is a great way to build collaboration and comraderie. 2) Students learn how to use a social media platform, in a closed environment. 3) Students learn the importance of netiquette (writing appropriately). 4) Students learn how to adapt images, to save them, to import them, to embed video, which can be helpful to students wanting to learn computer programming. 5) Students understand the meaning of hyperlinks and how to create them. 6) SMARTER Balanced Assessments will require students to enter information into text boxes; therefore, students need practice composing digital content as paper and pencil testing moves to a digital format. 7) Students generate their own passwords and learn to protect them, an important part of Internet Safety. 8) Blogging is a great way to teach kids the importance of staying on topic. 9) Blogging can be used to develop self-reflection and summary writing skills.

Kidblog allows you to set up a class set of blogs for your students that no one else can see, unless you let them. It encourages kids to respond to each other's writing, and also allows you (and them) to see a record of their writing over the year. There is also an app available for mobile devices, so kids can use it almost anywhere.

This is a fun way for students to share ideas and build off each other's ideas. I like how easy it is to setup. I like all the different privacy features you can have. We have been using this in our Global Read Aloud and have connected to other classes across the country and I put their blogs on our blogroll so students can easily access them. I would like a few more simplifying options for when you post something because my 2nd graders do not need all the bells and whistles of being able to change the color and size of the font. It is our 4th week using kidblog and the kids are knowing what to do and it is fun to see them progress in using this technology and exploring other class' blogs too. Some kids are getting creative with their comments, which is fun to see. I like how you just scroll to the names and then type in the password, because some of my students would struggle with typing their name in correctly each time. You can see where people are from who are reading the blog and that is pretty cool too.

Kidblog allows me to have as much control as I need for my class. I can allow students the freedom to have their own blog page, edit their name, edit their password, or edit their account. I can also easily set it so that students can only respond to my posts and do not have further access. The direct link to my page gives that extra step of security and importing my class list was easy as 1-2-3! Once set up, I like that I can share resources with students through pictures, videos, music, newspaper articles, and blogging. I can engage students in a simple lesson or a lesson that gives more depth and meaning to a topic. I can have students respond in writing, by uploading a video, or uploading an audio commentary, allowing for better differentiation.

Kidblogs allows me to set-up blogs for my students without requiring emails. I can set up blogs that are public or private and I can allow students to freely comment and post or require that posts and comments are moderated. I both like and dislike that there are only a very few options on Kidblog. The lack of options make it easy to use and set-up. Sometimes I wish there were more options for customization. All items I need to make my posts and for my students to make their posts interesting are there.

Kidblog takes blogging and makes safe for kids at no cost. The tool is free, the set up is fairly easy, and then there is a little maintenance to keep it moving. I love that I nothing gets published until I approve it. I don't need to worry about weird people leaving weird messages for my students. I would like to see kidblog make approving comments and posts easier on the website. The process is really simple on a iphone or ipad.

I love how I can post videos for mY third graders. They can watch when they have time. If they have free time they can engage in extra credit on edmodo.