Student Blogging in Google Classroom

How do I create a blog for our students and classroom? Is the perfect place to do this? What I’ve done here is I’ve created a Google classroom called student blog example, and I’ve added some students to it and what we’re going to do is use this classroom to enable students to create posts on various topics.

One of the things to check first before we do this is to make sure that you have this setting, enabled students can post and comment, and if I click on this drop-down, you can see other ways that you can sort of control how students interact with classroom. But for the blogging class, this is a very important setting, because you want students to be able to make posts. And what’s going to happen, is that these two students on all assumably, all of your students in your class will be able to post to your classroom.

Screen this is a great way for younger students to get started with blogging, because it’s kind of a walled garden. These classrooms are not visible outside of the classroom membership, but in order to create authentic audiences for your students, you can share these classrooms with students and other classes, or even students in other schools. And, of course, the students who are members of the class will be able to see the posts that your students make.

So what I want to do is jump over into the student account and show you how this works. So here I am in the students screen. The student is called demo student 1 and they have the plus button down here in the or right corn and what they can do is create a blog post. So I am going to go ahead and click on create posts and I’ve already kind of typed up a response for the post. So I’m just going to copy that in here or paste it in your other, and this post is about model rockets.

This could be an exercise that you have your students do on introducing themselves and talking about their interests. One of the things that the student says in her post is that she put a camera on one of her model rockets and made a article, and so, as you can see just like, with assignment students, can post different things to their blog post. So in this case the student is going to post a article that she made and now I just grab this off the internet, so we’ll disease that so, let’s type in the URL of the article.

So we can get the right, one we’ll add that to the post and then the student can just go ahead and click the post button and boom there. It is that has her name on it right her posts and the article and now other members of the class can comment on her blog post. So now, I’m in another students account demo student to and I’m on the same classroom. The student can see the post that we just made from demo student one and read the article that she attached and read her post.

But this student can also make a post and our assignment is to introduce ourselves so we’ll go ahead and make a pose. And once again, I’m going to go ahead and just paste in her response. So what she’s saying is that she’s demo student she lives in your family and that one of the things that she likes to do is draw, and what she wants to do is include a drawing of a ski trip that she went on last winter, that she Did so she’s going to go over here to attach a file of station of a picture of the drawing that she made in her drive and so we’ll just select files from her computer or on a Chromebook? And this is the drawing so we’ll just open that up and then upload it to classroom and then there it is look at the drawing and then she can go ahead and post her response and while she’s here, she may want to go ahead and just leave A comment on demo student ones, blog post but say she can post our comment there, and so, let’s just jump back over to the teacher screen and take a look at that.

So here we are back in the teacher view of our blog classroom. We can see all the posts and comments that students have made. Maybe we want to offer some feedback ourselves on a students post, so we could do this. You can say, like I love about, and then we can just post that up there and a student will see it. Now. I wanted to talk just a little bit about some of the controls you have. Occasionally, you might get a student who post something inappropriate to the blog, so I wanted to show you what you could do when that happens.

So in this case everybody’s been very nice and encouraging. So we’re not having that problem. But let’s say let’s say demo student says something that was kind of neat. You can go over to these three dots against their account and you can one you can delete the post, so you can just get it off the blog. You have that kind of control and you can also mute the student. So when you do that, the student won’t be able to post to the blog, and maybe you can go and have a discussion with them about what’s appropriate, to put on a blog and do a little digital citizenship lesson with them.

And then once you’ve talked to them you can unmute them and let them post again. Additionally, you can also shut down posting for the whole class. If you ever need to by just switching to this setting here for the classroom itself, only the teacher can post for comment and that will shut off posting and commenting for all of your students. So that’s the basics of you know how to kind of create on multi offer blog for students and give them some authentic audience the ability to comment on each other’s posts and make posts.

You know if you wanted to kind of organize this, you could use the announcement feature to say a bright blog is about blessing that energy and you can just post that as kind of an instruction to students and then they could start to post. So there are a number of different ways that you can use this. I hope you have enjoyed this kind of different use of classroom as usual. Let us know if you have any questions and take care.