Integrating Social Networking

I found that this activity was a bit tougher to plan and execute due to the age of students that I teach. First graders (six year olds) are an odd group of students to social network with. I first considered incorporating Edmodo into my lesson, but decided against it. Edmodo is an excellent tool for students who are good at reading and more mature and able to navigate the site/app more easily. I found that this would pose a pretty big challenge for the little minds that I teach. We regularly use the app SeeSaw in class, and my students are masters at posting, recording, and creating. One thing that SeeSaw does well is protect students privacy by not allowing other parents access to anyones account, except for their child. 

Enter: SeeSaw Blogs! Seesaw has totally revamped their site and app and added another layer of depth to their program by adding a blogging button. Students can now take their work that they would normally upload to their journal and share it on our class blog. How cool is that? The touch of a button, and work is posted to our class blog. The Qr Code for our class blog is below:

 I posted a photo below of the blog access via the globe button:

You can see how easy it is for students to contribute to our blog just by clicking a button. How awesome is that?!

Project Outline: I decided to incorporate our SeeSaw blog into our weekly reading activity from Journeys. We read the story: Gus Takes the Train and focused on short /u/ words all week. A screenshot of my lesson plan is below:

I decided to use our spelling word sort and weekly word work activities as initial posts on our blog. One thing that I think is important to teach our students is the appropriate use of hashtags. I had a good conversation with my students about making sure that they hashtags that they use are relevant to what they are posting.  I also think that using the appropriate hashtags along with posting the correct activity is a great way to not only check for understanding, but also assess students. I love that this encompasses the work, technology use, and so much more into one assessment. How appropriate! I decided to model hashtags for my students and added them to two students work on the blog. I posted a screenshot below:

Although this is a simple way to introduce children to various forms of social networking, I felt that it was most appropriate for their age and "getting their feet wet!" I hope that you agree! Please feel free to post comments or suggestions!