This resource has been produced for the Digital Futures for Teacher Education project, part of UK Open Educational Resources Programme Phase Three. This project seeks to create materials (OERs) for trainee teachers and to develop guidance on digital literacy practice in teaching and learning in the school sector. For most up-to-date information about the project, please refer to the DeFT project blog

Guide to blogging

Dear parents and carers

Blogging with Ms Stafford’s Stars!

Right, here we go! I have set up a blog... I am new to this, and I’m guessing that the children will be too, but some of you may use blogs or keep blogs of your own at home. Some of you may not know anything about them! Hopefully we will learn together.

So firstly, the address. Go to your web browser – internet explorer, firefox, safari etc – and type into the address bar the URL of the blog

www.mundellastars.wordpress.com

You will see the front page of the blog that I have started. It should look like this –

What I want to happen is for all of the children to register on wordpress.com as users. Click on register on the right hand side of the blog to take you to here -

This content is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 UK: England & Wales http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

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and click on sign up for just a username.

Choose a username for your child such as Jackmundella or Elliestars. Please don’t use surnames. You will need to sign up with an email address. Maybe the children could get their own? Activate the account by going to the link in the email you will be sent.

When your child has a username, log into the wordpress site by going back to the mundellastars blog www.mundellastars.wordpress.com

Log into the site here

When they are logged in they will be able to leave comments on the posts by clicking on the the little speech bubble after the post. (And if you register as well, so will you!)

This content is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 UK: England & Wales http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

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And off we go!

I would like to assure you that I will never publish your child’s full name, or address, but I would like to include some pictures and videos of the children’s learning occasionally. Please will you sign below that you are happy for me to do so. This will be a public blog, and will hopefully engage your children further in their learning as we begin to make stronger links with home and the wider community. I want to encourage the children to use other classes’ blogs to make links across the world so I would appreciate your support in this by signing the form below.

Please do get in touch if you have any problems signing up or using the blog. I am new to this too so will be learning how it all works over the next few months

Ms Stafford

_____________________________________________________________________________________

I give my permission for photographs of my child to be included on the class blog.

I understand that my child’s full name will never be published or made available through the blog.

I understand that the blog is a public website available on the internet.

Child’s name......................................................................................................

Signed................................................................................... Date......................................

This content is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 UK: England & Wales http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

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