CONFIRMATION: Education Blogs for Kids

Creating a BLOG for your confirmation students is pretty easy these days and can create some great opportunities for discussion.  They can also be protected from the general public.  Student blogs can be a fantastic way to get kids to think about their faith outside of class.  They can be used in many ways but be very clear about your expectations.  Students must:

• Post a comment regarding the topic that was discussed that week.  i.e. Give three reasons why...
• Post questions regarding a topic for future discussion.  i.e. Come up with 2 questions regarding...
• Respond to challenge questions via comments before or after a class session.  Be sure to remind them to tell why they answer one way or another or ask open ended questions.
• Answer survey questions via comments.
• Have a conversation about a specific topic with family members and blog about it. i.e. In 2 sentences each, tell what a person over 50 thinks about...

The cool thing about creating a blog for the students is that as they respond you can see what they're thinking and it can help shape some of your discussions.

There are two places I've found to create a blog for educational purposes:

One is by WordPress and it's called edublogs.org.  On this site you can require those who comment to be registered users, close the ability to comment after a specified number of days, comments must be held for moderation, administrator must approve comments.  In order to create a class and create a password for students and to adjust privacy settings to limit public access to the blog you need to pay a fee of $7.95 per month.

The other is kidblog.org and it's pretty simple to use and completely free.  It has the same options as edublog except limiting the days allowed to comment.  On each posting there is an option to make it password protected so that students need to have a password to comment (not just anybody can comment) and you can add students into the class and give them all a password so they can post. There are some easy to watch videos on how to get started on YouTube too.

Get those kids blogging about their faith!