Kidblog is a publishing tool that gives teachers the ability to provide a safe, kid friendly environment for their students to publish online. Teachers can monitor all of their students activity, even comments, and have control over what material goes live and to how wide a range of audience. Students can even send codes to their parents to give them access too! The site even allows other classes to connect with one another! With Google integration, students can also embed Google Docs, Presentations or Drawings to enhance their publishing.
Teachers can start with a free account which gives them basic access to all of the sites features, and allows them to invite or send special "join codes" to up to 40 students per "class". There are two tiers of paid accounts, the "Teacher Premium" and "Admin Pro", which start at $29/year per teacher.As a prospective English teacher, I can imagine using Kidblog as a great tool for my students to write their impressions and opinions of the books we read in class, and talk to one another about them. One feature of this site that I find most appealing for my future classes is the class connect feature. As a secondary teacher, this would be a great way for me to get all of my students to talk to one another on the same material.
I feel that this site really aims at relieving any technological limitations by creating a very basic, straight-forward interface, allowing all users to navigate the site easily. Since teachers are in the middle of everything that goes on within the class, and there are no ads within the site, I think it makes for a very safe environment as well for students. The only limitations that I see are for other content areas, as in I'm not sure how a math or science class could benefit from a class blog.
I am also going to be an English teacher and could not agree with you more. This would be a useful app allowing students to share their thoughts on a book or an article that they had to read for class. Not only is it great to read the opinions/views of your students individually, but also allows them to converse with one another.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that this tool allows all your classes to discuss the same topic at once is very CONVENIENT. I would consider using this in a health education curriculum. This would allow educators to get all the students in the various classes to be on the same page. Awesome find!
ReplyDeleteI agree that the class connect feature is great, because a student in one class may raise a point that students in another class may not have realized. As a future math teacher, I think this site could be utilized as more of a question and answer forum than a blog.
ReplyDeleteI have found that my students learn well by writing their own stories and being creative. I think KidBlog is a great idea.
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