TZunker - Russell Street Impression

My first impression of Russell Street School blogging is how much of it there is! One thing I would like to know is how their blogging looked in their first years doing it. I know when I think about blogging in my own classroom I wonder what a good starting point would be to not only be effective, but consistent. It’s very evident that Russell Street School is committed to using blogging with their students (and their families) and it shows in the amount content and quality of content on their blogs. With the massive amount of content required of each student, I would also like to know how much time they get during their school day to write in their blogs and how much is done at home. If the expectation is that this is done at home I am pretty sure this style of blogging would not work well with my students. I have quite a few who don’t have regular access to computers or Internet. Also, if they are doing it during the school day, how do they determine who gets the technology and when? I would be very interested to know an answer to this questions because it is one of the most pressing needs at my school: lab time.

As I was looking through what students had blogged about, I noticed that not every entry had a comment, and that in room 9 there weren’t any comments from other students. I imagine this is purposeful, especially because it’s a young group of students. I would also like to know what the policy for commenting on blog posts is for teachers. Do teachers make their own policy? Is there a school wide expectation?

Overall, I’m impressed by what Russell School has accomplished with its e-portfolio blogs. They use a number of different types of posts (text, image, audio, video) and a large portion of the content is well put together. It’s great to see a school that is committed to using blogging with its students. It’s also great to see a school that has taken the time to implement technology in the building the right way.