Monday, February 4, 2013

Kindergarteners Blogging: No Kidding

Listen to these kindergarteners from Ms. Cassidy's class talk about what they think of blogging and how they're using it.  Be sure to leave a response. What do you think of their comments?

Do you think kindergarteners should be blogging? What will happen when they enter first grade? Should they continue blogging? What about when they enter upper grades? How do you see their blogging experiences affecting their literacy skills?


Five Card Flickr Stories


The Five Card Story is a quick digital story game put together by an educator, Alan Levine, who also goes by the name of CogDog. Check out his site, Five Card Story, and create your own Five Card Story. The images are ones stored in Flickr under the Creative Commons License, free to use.

After reading 31 blogs this weekend and then preparing website notes for this week, I needed a break, so played with Five Card Story  This is an idea you can implement in your class by giving your students any five photos available, and for older students, you can even have them try out the Five Card Story site.

Once you finish creating your story using Five Card Story, you will see a code that you can embed into your blog by switching from the Compose to the HTML tab in Blogger. The URL for the story is also available and that can be shared with others for them to access your story at the site.

In addition to using random photos to stir one's imagination for story writing, the exercise serves two additional purposes:
  • It initiates the idea of matching photos to storytelling, serving as an introduction to a unit on digital storytelling
  • It helps teach students about what photos found on the Internet they can legitimately use. In Flickr, photos that can be reused are marked as such and have in their posting both the URL to use for attribution and the embed code for converting the photo with its attribution right into a website, blog, wiki, or other online platform. Those using the photo can use either method to acknowledge the source. 
Here are five cards, photos, I was randomly dealt to create a story. Note the attributions for each photo automatically pop up under each.

Five Card Story: Walk on the Wild Side
a #etmooc story created by Midnight Poker Player (that is the nickname I chose since I created this around midnight.)

flickr photo by cogdogblog

flickr photo by cogdogblog

flickr photo by cogdogblog

flickr photo by cogdogblog

flickr photo by cogdogblog

And my masterpiece (joking) story. If I had more time and energy, I would have created a story with dialogue and more.


I escaped into the woods one snowy night. What I thought was a polar bear turned out to be a snow figure. On the run, I looked for a car to escape. On the dashboard, I found a pair of dark sunglasses, perfect for my disguise. Hungry from days on the run, I sought food, but only could find oranges. To my dismay, they were already eaten, and just the rinds remained. I trembled as someone shook me and realized it was all but a dream.