Have you visited other blogs and left comments to students in other countries? Would you like to continue blogging? How does it make you feel to know that other students and your parents are reading what you are writing at school? What interesting things have you learned about from visiting other blogs? How do you overcome the challenges of reading blogs that are written by students who speak another language?

These are some of the questions that we asked our students. Their answers were recorded on video and you can see and also hear them here.

The students had good answers for these questions, but I would like to share a little bit more.  As a resource teacher, I jump on every opportunity to showcase my students’ abilities. When I returned from the 2009 TCEA Conference, I was convinced that my students could improve a multitude of skills through blogging. There were no blogs on our intermediate campus, so we would be the pioneers in this technological adventure.  Were we up for it? You bet!

We wanted the other students to notice what we were doing and ask their teachers why they had no classroom blog.  In a short time, our students had visitors from over 35 countries and over 200 comments posted to their blog.  Every Thursday, these students proudly wear their C-O Connections blogging t-shirts.
Other students acknowledge them by name now. They possess an ownership for their learning and a confidence that they did not have before blogging.  Parents are beginning to post in reply to their child’s posts and have subscribed to our blog. The process of blogging has brought a closeness between school and community, and more importantly, between child and parent.

Making this change in our classroom curriculum has truly made a difference in the lives of each of my students, and some of them will never be the same.

This post has been written on “the differences blogging has made in our lives” as part of The Edublogger’s Student Competition!