Ever since my first experience with kids blogging back in the spring of 2005, I’ve struggled to help kids write good comments. I think the problem arises from the comment box itself. It looks like a chat window or text box on a phone. As a result, kids seem to gravitate to writing in SMS-speak, such as “Gr8 post CU l8tr!”
Another problem is that they often want to write a comment but don’t know what to say, so they end up writing unenlightening comments such as, “I like cheese!” and “I am awesome!!!!!!!!!”
As much fun as those comments seem to be to write, they are not very exciting to receive. To that end, I’ve been revising a commenting lesson for fourth grade students. It finally went live this week. To my delight, at least in the short term, it worked.
I started with this presentation (embedded below). I worked through the first nine slides with them. There are notes for the teacher in the notes section of most slides.
Before showing the embedded video from Mrs. Yollis’ class, I draw a connection to their non-fiction critical literacy unit. One of the lessons from that unit teaches children that when you are researching a question, you are not limited to reading books at your reading level. It is okay to also read books below your reading level. What is important is that the resource is helping you answer your question.
We make that connection in this lesson to both reinforce the non-fiction critical literacy unit and to help them not feel like the video is too babyish for their sophisticated fourth grade selves.
Before they watch the video, I instruct them to try to write down at least two of the tips from the video. If they can write even more, that’s even better. They write those in Notability on their iPad.
When I get to slide 9, I show them this document and point out how it has all of their notes from the video. I have already send them the link to this document via email. Also included in that email is a link to a list of all their classmate's blogs.
(Note that this document looks much better in Google Drive. Publishing it to the web to embed here has changed its dementions.)
For our exercise, students were assigned another student's blog to visit and comment upon. Students were given a large sticky note on which to write their comment. Then they brought the sticky note to the front of the room to conference with an adult to see where it fit on our rubric. Many students were excited to be in the Even Better column.
After the comment was approved, students typed it into the blog and published. We finished the lesson by learning how to approve comments sent to our blogs. Fortunately, the blogs sends the received comment via email so the blogger knows to go approve a new comment.
As you can see from the slideshow below, students were highly engaged and eager to receive comments.
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