This summer think about starting a family blog. It’s a terrific communication project as well as a collaborative learning opportunity for everyone — kids, parents, grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles.
Last year I taught a short online blogging course to parents at my school. My Start a Family Blog class, hosted on a WordPress blog, is still available. The posts will guide interested families through the basics of starting a blog for relatives and friends.
Over at some novel ideas, a blog authored by librarian Stacy Nockowitz would be bloggers will find a comprehensive and rich list of resource links to help get started. She organizes her links into categories:
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- Blogging Basics
- Blogging Resources
- Blogs About Blogging
- Blogging Platforms
- Images
Also included at the bottom of the resource page is a cool glossary of blogging terms.
Excellent activity, especially during the long summer vacation. My 11 yr old has created a readers blog where she and 3 friends are reading books and carrying on conversations on their reading via a private blog, even as they travel far and wide from Iowa!
A suggestion – if kids are going to blog/comment on the family blog, it is a good idea to secure the blog. With WordPress, a simple plugin (http://johnny.chadda.se/projects/wp-require-auth/) will help you get there and keep prying eyes away from kids’ posts.
Thank you for this information. The plugin looks interesting. I’d love to hear more about how the it works.
Another way to keep the blog private is to limit it to the basic number of readers that WordPress allows for a free private blog (it used to be twenty-five). For a small yearly fee, WordPress allows a larger number of private users.