Russell Street School

Wow!  I am truly amazed by the Russell Street School website and student blogs.  The Russell Street School in New Zealand has created an informative, inspirational resource for their parents and the community. As I browsed the various features of the website, I couldn't help but think that they must have a full time web designer who created and regularly works on the site. I also explored a number of the classroom blogs and chose to focus on the Room 11 Poutokomanawa blog, as I concluded that this class was closest in age to my own 6th graders.
Some of the things I immediately liked about this blog were:

• The word clouds at the top of the blog.  I love the visual nature of word clouds and this drew me right in.
• The link to Inspirational Quotes - loved the quotes and pictures
• I appreciated that when you clicked on the author of each post, you were taken to a link with an avatar and other posts by the same author.  No personal information was included, which I believe is very important in a classroom blog.
• On the sidebar was a list of post criteria 
  

The only negatives I see with the Russell Street School website and blogs are:

• The website must require a lot of bandwidth as my computer took a long time to load the site and the fan on my computer went crazy trying to keep it from overheating!
• As I mentioned above, the site must require a lot of upkeep.  My school does have a full time IT department but we do not have a web designer employed specifically to keep up with a school website.  

Last year I did attempt a version of student blogging in our classroom.  Over the previous summer, I created a Weebly class website.  I had general information about our class; links for parents and students; a page for quotes, polls and other fun stuff; and a page that I had intended would be a student blog page. At the end of each school day, I envisioned the students writing on the blog a review of what we had covered that day for parents and students who were absent.  Let me just say, the blog lasted just over two months.  I found that the parents rarely, if ever, checked the site and the students bloggers at the end of the day really had no interest in writing the blog.

So...I am definitely reconsidering what I am going to do this year.  I have quite a few ideas and this class (EdTech 537) is helping me to flesh out exactly what our blogs will look like. I realize that the students need to be personally invested in their blogs.  I also think that individual blogs may be a better choice than a class blog, although this has pros and cons as well. Currently I am considering an app called SeeSaw which has a lot of the features I would like to use in a class blog.

By the way, I was curious to know what Poutokomanawa means and could not find it on the blog.  I looked it up and found this:

"A Poutokomanawa (wharenui) is a communal house of the Māori people of New Zealand, generally situated as the focal point of a marae. Wharenui are usually called meeting houses in New Zealand English, or simply called whare. Also called a whare rūnanga ("meeting house") or whare whakairo (literally "carved house"), the present style of wharenui originated in the early to middle nineteenth century."