Easy Blogger Jr. Multimodal Tutorial

I finally was able to set up Easy Blogger Jr. to use in my classroom this year! I was really excited about starting this year long project to use with my Kindergartners students and my program at UNH.  I say "was" because many, many, many times I considered just giving up on it but thankfully I didn't and now my little learners will get to enjoy the benefits. :)

I first saw the Easy Blogger Jr. app/program this summer as I was just getting started at UNH.  I posted it to the community and thought maybe someone else could use it as a tool.  After hearing from a few people that I could use it for some future projects at UNH I decided to try it out.

Easy Blogger Jr. is a free app where students can record a video, take a picture, or write about a book they have read and share it to the classroom reading blog.  What I really like about the app is it follows a gradual release model which is so important with my Kindergarten friends.  Students can start by taking a picture of a book and then by the end of the year they might be able to record a video book chat.

As I began setting up Easy Blogger Jr. I realized it wasn't so easy!  It took me many, many hours to set up a Gmail address (to use just for the blog), figure out how to add students and then trying to figure out the best way the app could be used.  The app let's students identify themselves by their picture I thought this was a great feature until I realized it is a public blog and I wouldn't want to put my students information and picture out for everyone to see.  I then thought maybe I should just scrap the whole program but after brainstorming for a few days and talking with people at UNH, my principal and my school district I decided that I could have students draw their own picture instead of using an actual picture.  I think this will be a great way for them to take ownership of their work and blogging.  I'm still deciding if I am going to label them by first name or by number but in the scheme of things it's not a major bump in the road.

I then thought about how I would share this app with my students.  I decided to do a screen cast of a powerpoint slideshow with my audio explaining each slide with screenshots from the actual app.  This also took a lot of time because I wanted to get the wording right for my students and make it easy to follow.  After many more hours I uploaded by Multimodal Tutorial to YouTube for Easy Blogger Jr.  *Please let me know if the sound doesn't work for reason I had difficulty uploading it to YouTube.*

So now the real work begins, introducing my students to Easy Blogger Jr.!  I think they will really like it and I'm looking forward to using it this year.  Since this new for all of use I'm going to use my introductory Easy Blogger Jr. lesson plan to get the show on road.  As Dr. Seuss would say...

Images Courtesy of:

http://classes.slis.lsu.edu/wu/7008/fa13/bsavoie/7008project/theme.html

http://www.theeasyappcompany.com/

This work by Anne Marie Lanning is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.