KPBSD Blogging Grows

KPBSD blogs share content from classes, schools, media, stories of interest, adventures, and educators' expertise and experience. Our KPBSD school district is vast, and people communicate on and through many platforms. Blogs provide an opportunity to listen, grow, and broadcast or share information.

What exactly is a blog? Simplistically, a blog is a log of something written by someone, located on the world-wide web. Thus, a web-log is named a blog. The following five descriptive words may help you understand BLOGS:

Broadcastwith images, words, and video, to connect around a subject, topic, group, or person

Listenwriter and reader listen to the exchange of ideas, information, and content

Opportunityto learn, respond, and engage

Growconnections, give bounce to something that matters, offers us something we seek

Share

The long and short of it? Information grows at warp speed. There are several types of KPBSD blogs.

School blogs

Many of our KPBSD schools are already actively blogging! Over the next six months, you will find every school has a blog; the blog sites will replace Edline as the online communication between schools, parents, and the wider community. Each school can customize their blog, adding photos, text, video, newsletters, PDF links, site council information, a calendar—everything the website via Edline provided. A plus: the blog sites allow for comments and interaction, are easily accessible to everyone, and can be shared on social media sites. 

A complete directory to KPBSD blogs is online in the Communications section of the website, and is updated as new blogs request to be added: KPBSD Blog Directory. Click on any of the images in this story to see individual blogs.

District-wide blogs

To be effective, bloggers—someone who posts content on a blog—should be consistent with posts on a regular basis, write from their area of interest and expertise, respond to comments in a timely manner, and need not create lengthy posts.

 Dr. Steve Atwater is committed to writing a new blog post every week. He believes, "My superintendent blog is a great forum for sharing my ideas and information.  I also view it as a quick way for folks to stay up to speed with district issues."

Our KPBSD webmaster, Mike Crawford, created the "Awesome High School" blog in order to help KPBSD employees learn to navigate the WordPress blog platform adopted by KPBSD. It's playful, and instructs step-by-step how to add content, images, create tags and categories, and so forth. Crawford explains: "I created Awesome High School for KPBSD employees to get familiar with the blog platform and learn to manage their school's site, but it's a great way for anyone to get familiar with blogging. Plus it involves wombats, ipso facto, it's pretty awesome."

KPBSD Communications created a blog, "Field Notes" in order to offer news releases, share school stories, and model how schools and educators can utilize their own blogs. Pegge Erkeneff, Communications Specialist, explains, "Many of our KPBSD educators—and students—have stories to share. Blogging is a powerful media to share images and to celebrate our school district. I created the Field Notes blog to announce media and public information news, offer applause for our students, teachers, and schools, generate conversation, and to tell stories that people on the Kenai Peninsula and beyond will find of interest."

You'll find district-wide blogs highlighting events that involve our students including Mind-A-Mazes, District-wide Choir, Battle of the Books, and the KPBSD Information Technologies (IT) Department, among others.

Educators

Several KPBSD educators use blogs to create collaboration with and among students, and to share student work with parents.

 Suzanne Bishop, who teaches at Kachemak Selo School, created a blog, "The Odyssey: High School Language Arts Class." She believes, "Blogging is a great way to get students to talk about a text. Students first answer the questions on their own, then read and comment on other students' answers. Many times these comments are corrections to their answers and make the whole question and answer process more interactive."

 Kara Schreur, a second grade teacher at Redoubt Elementary School, engages her students with polls, posts photographs of student activities, classroom management expectations, and more. She writes, "In our technology driven world, blogging is an easy and effective way of keeping parents informed about what is going on in the classroom. It's accessible anytime and isn't like a paper handout that can easily get misplaced. The students love going online and voting in our class polls, and also checking out the website links that are provided." View "Miss Schreur's 2nd Grade Class Blog."   

 Soldotna Montessori students and parents actively use John DeVolld's class blog. Fourth to sixth grade students who are absent use the online schedule to follow the events that took place during the day, class assignments are posted, copies of field trip forms, rubrics, matrices, assignment instruction, and resources such as Discovery Education, student blog login, Google docs, EdPerformance login, Moodle, and others are linked. Students post their final work on their blogs. DeVolld says, "My blog is critical to my instruction and communication with students. I provide students and parents with just about everything they need to know via my blog. My blog is an important tool for my students learning; students find it a necessary and useful tool to interact with, in order to accomplish many learning tasks." 

Blog Links (Click on any image in this highlight story to go directly to that blog.)

Schools

View specific school blogs. The diversity in our forty-four schools is evident in each schools unique images, and format of content.

• Chapman School
• Homer High School newspaper, "The Mariner Compass"  
• Homer Middle School 
• Nanwalek School
• Paul Banks Elementary School
• Soldotna High School
• Tustumena Elementary
 

Teachers

Many teachers are blogging with their classes, and to share projects and opportunities for students to grow. These are only a few samples.

• Miss Schreur's 2nd Grade Class Blog    
• Miss Suzanne's "High School Language Arts Class  
• Mr. D's Class—Working and Learning Together  
• Seward High School "Student Art"

KPBSD District-wide blogs  

• The KPBSD Superintendent blog  
• KPBSD Communications "Field Notes" blog  
• Jordan's Help Desk "KPBSD IT department"
• Amanda Adams, Technology Coach for the Eastern Peninsula 

Additional blogs are listed on the KPBSD Blog Directory  

Additional Links

• KPBSD Blog Directory  
• What is a blog? 
• KPBSD Disclaimer  The KPBSD Blog server is a tool to be used for instructional purposes. When starting a new project such as this extreme care should be taken to insure that any and all content posted by students remains appropriate and educational in nature. Please take time to review your students Blogs on a regular basis. The KPBSD Internet use agreement should be reviewed with your students and a conversation about your expectations should be had prior to 'letting them loose' producing content on the Internet that is globally accessible.