Blogs are a powerful (and fun!) tool for sharing ideas and discussing those ideas with classmates. We will use blogs to discuss the books we read in small-group book clubs. You will make a post on your “Book Blog” once per week. The teacher and other group members will view your blog posts and leave comments.

Before blogging with your book club, we need to make sure we're ready to put our ideas "out there" online. Always make sure you're being a responsible digital citizen. Check out this YouTube video and then add an entry to the discussion about digital citizenship.

You will be a part of a team of 4-5 students. Your team members will all read the same book, at approximately the same pace. Other teams will be reading different books. Before you can start reading, you need to choose a book! Click the link below to decide which book club you want to join.

*Teachers, you'll need to create choice options for titles you want students to draw from. Students could obtain these texts from the library, bookstore, online, audio book, iBooks (for reading on iPod Touch), etc.

Next, your team will need to decide how to break up the book into "chunks" that you can read and blog about over the course of a week.

Finally, it's time to choose a job for your first blog post! See the [link] job descriptions page for more details. Make a choice for the first week. After the first post, [link] jobs will rotate based on the job you just completed.

*Teachers, create a choice activity for each book. You can limit visibility of these choices by assigning students to groups based on their book choices. This will help keep the page uncluttered, and will prevent a student from responding to another book's job list. Once students have selected their initial job, the jobs rotate on a scheduled basis.

More book titles go here...

You've chosen a book and divided it into 4 sections. Now it's time to learn about your weekly responsibilities as a proud member of your book club!

There are three important days to keep in mind each week when completing your blog assignments: Monday, Thursday, and Sunday.

One of your responsibilities will be doing your weekly "job." Read these directions for detailed descriptions and examples of each job.

After the first week, use the job rotation schedule to determine your job for next week.

Use these video tutorials to help you get started with your blog assignments.

Click here to go to our class blog space at Kidblog.org!

*Teachers, update this link to reflect your actual Kidblog Class URL (e.g. kidblog.org/classname). Visit kidblog.org to create your own class account.

Submit your blog post URLs here. Paste one URL per week. You should have 4 posts by the end of the book.

Glossary of Blogging XML file is located in course files to import back to the glossary upon course restore.

Each week, you will be able to earn 25 points for your blog post, comments, and timeliness in completing your responsibilities. View the following Google Docs item to see how to earn full credit.