Class Shared Writing Blog

Blogging is such a great tool to use to encourage your writers. This year I created a 100WC Blog (see previous post if you aren't sure about 100WC) where all of my students are authors and able to add their writing. I was worried they would be able to edit each others posts but thankfully they do not have access to each others writing.

A huge benefit of having all students writing on one blog is so they have easy access to each other's writing to give feedback. Parents can also easily see their students writing and it is also all in one place for the teacher to access.

To add multiple authors in blogger:

1. Click on settings in blogger.

2. Under BASIC scroll down and you will get to PERMISSIONS. Here you will see yourself as the ADMIN and under that there is an +ADD AUTHORS button. Click on this and add your students.

3. Blogger has made it easy for you to do this and you can choose from your contacts. Once your students accept the invite they will be authors to the blog. Make sure you keep them as authors and do not make them admin. Doing this will enable them to make changes to the blog and change other students work.

The final thing you will need to do is teach the students how to add labels and ensure you enable labels on the blog. Every time students put up a piece of writing they need to put their name as a label. This makes it easy for me, other students and parents to find the piece of writing from specific students. I also get my students to give their writing a title using their name first.

This term each student will be getting a class list. They will start at their name and then work their way down making comments and ticking them off on that once they have commented for that student. They will need to do 5 comments a week - this means every student should get 5 comments a week. The following week they will do the next 5 students on their list and so on.

If you have not seen my post on how to create a comment template click here as this makes sure the students follow a structure when giving feedback. Without this my students would write comments like, cool!! nice writing!!! This has really helped with the quality of comments they give each other now.

Post Comment Template in Blogger

In my class we have a blog where we share writing with each other, and we are now starting to look into peer feedback (this is part of my teacher inquiry). My students were struggling with what to write or how to start their feedback so I have added a selection of sentence starters that pops up when they comment in blogger. See below:

This is pretty easy to do. Just see the image below and follow these simple instructions:

1. Go to blogger

2. Click on 'Settings'

3. Click on 'Posts, comments and sharing'

4. Add what you want to put in the .Comment Form Message'

Click 'Save'

Sentence Starters:

I really liked . . . because . . .
I really liked the way you . . .
I enjoyed reading this because . . .
It was especially good when you . . . because . . .

I think you need to . . . because . . .
Next time you write . . .
Think about adding . . .
Have you thought about . . .
To improve your . . . try . . .
Perhaps you could . . .

Post Template

This video will show you how to create a 'Post Template'. Every time I create a new post in my TAI I always start with 'What? So what? Now what?' and I have to type this is every single time. Now that I have created a post template - yours might be different - it opens a new post for me with this already on. Follow the video tutorial, it will literally take you 2 minutes. Hope this helps.