Keeping in touch with a blog: Fiordland Kindergarten

After attending the ULearn06 conference and hearing how blogs were being used in other educational contexts, the teachers at Fiordland Kindergarten began to investigate if blogging would be a useful tool to keep in touch with these children and their families while they were away. Here is an outline of the process they went through to set up and use the blog:

Setting up the blog

• Fiordland Kindergarten began by thinking about the purpose for their blog. In their case, the purpose was quite specific: enabling communication between the kindergarten and families overseas. Knowing this helped guide teachers' decisions about what to post on the blog and made the process more manageable.
• They also looked at other blogs for models (Manaia Kindergarten). They talked with other teachers in the ECE ICT PL programme via Skype and email to help them sort out how to start blogging.
• The kindergarten set up the blog in Blogger.
• As a result of attending cyber safety workshops, they chose to keep the blog private in order to protect the children and families at the kindergarten. As the purpose of the blog was solely for communication between particular families and the kindergarten, there was no need to make the blog open to everyone.

Using the blog

• Before each family travelled, the teachers showed them how to log in to the blog, and how to upload photos and content.
• Once the families were away, both they and the teachers and children at the centre contributed postings to the blog. In the case of families, the postings were mostly photos of the child with their extended family. The photos often showed landmarks visited or activities undertaken.
• At the kindergarten, teachers and children viewed the blog using a data projector and screen. Teachers talked with the children about what they were seeing and together they composed comments to post back to the children who were away.