Kidblog.org — What A Great Idea

An ALSC Blog post last May by Ernie Cox started some wheels turning here in Fort Wayne, Indiana.  The topic was “Cultivating Digital Lives” and Ernie introduced me to Kidblog.org.  This fall, I introduced the 6-11 year old kids in our Cyber Adventure Group to their very own blogs. And Ernie, the kids and I thank you!

All of the children, even the youngest in the group, voiced their enjoyment in the class.  They were able to experiment with fonts and color, uploading pictures, linking to additional information, and more.  A few of the most enthusiastic surprised me and didn’t continue to blog after the first session.  But a few of the others found their online voices and grabbed the microphone.

They wrote about everything — from pets to banana bread to freeware drawing applications.  For several months, as administrator of the group, I was approving posts and comments every day.  Family who lived in distant locations were commenting and bloggers were answering — communication in this post-letter-writing world.

Posts have dropped off lately. Home computers are on the fritz, my bloggers tell me.  We have a digital picture session coming up and will introduce slideoo and animoto.  I’m hoping that will rekindle the blogging enthusiasm.

Cyber Adventure Group is a home school targeted program, so parents are also in attendance.  I find that teaching computer-related classes to parents and kids together works great while the children are young.  The parents tell me that they find out that kids don’t know quite as much as the grown-ups thought they knew.  Parents seem to be a little less intimidated by the computers when they learn with their children.

My personal goal is to foster an attitude of sharing between parent/care-giver and child, opening a safe avenue of communication that will hopefully last.  At our Kidblog class, I explained that writing online is a lot like standing on-stage and making announcements while a film-crew records everything you’re saying.  You may be writing only to your grandma but you should remember that the microphone is on and it’s just as likely that you are talking to thousands of people.  Online safety is part of every Cyber Adventure Group meeting.

So ALSC, please visit our Kidblogs, comment if you like.  And if you start a similar program, please let us know if you have as much fun as we’ve had!

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Our guest blogger today is Becky White. Becky is a children’s librarian in the Children’s Services department of the Allen County Public Library. You can contact Becky at bwhite@acpl.info

If you’d like to write a guest post for the ALSC Blog, please contact Mary Voors, ALSC Blog manager, at alscblog@gmail.com.