A few months ago while I was traveling, Matt (my husband) and I were brainstorming ideas a new project. He’s a technology facilitator for an elementary school and is often looking for new ways to introduce Web2.0 tools to his teachers and students (particularly when they’re not even aware that’s happening). The school itself is new, and is a year-round school: at any given point in time, one quarter of the students and teachers are “tracked out.” Our goal was to try to come up with something that (a) would build a sense of community for the school population, (b) would take advantage of the year-round schedule, (c) would give students, teachers, and parents exposure to a new form of technology. 

We quickly settled on a variation of the Flat Stanley Project, in which Kyle the Crocodile, the school’s mascot, would blog about his travels. It helped immensely that I travel quite a bit, so I volunteered to take Kyle with me whenever I leave town. We really wanted students (and teachers) to do more than simply read the blog — we wanted to create a participatory experience and have students comment on posts, ask questions, and even do some research about the places Kyle visits. We also planned to have teachers and students take Kyle on trips as well — as long as they agree to keep it educational, take pictures while they’re gone, and write about their experiences. 

What’s worked: 

• The students, parents, and teachers are avid readers of the blog. If we go more than a few days without a post, the students let us know! Everyone has enjoyed getting to see and learn about new places. 
• We quickly realized that we needed more than one crocodile, so Kyle now has three siblings, all with distinct personalities: Katie, a pink and purple ruffled crocodile (who is the daredevil of the bunch); Carlyle, a shaggy, soft super-sized croc who is a big fan of long naps; and Kirby, the youngest sibling. 
• Having identical twin crocodiles when possible — or at least easily replaceable animals. We’re a bit concerned about the longevity of a few in particular. 
• Everyone wants to take a crocodile on vacation. We’ve been able to accommodate most requests so far, but we need to formalize the process a bit. 
• Keeping it educational. So far, so good — but it’s taken effort. 
• Teaching the kids proper blogging ettiquette. Since we’re working with elementary school students, we need to require them to only use their first names when posting comments, and they’re not allowed to use any sort of email address to communicate with Kyle. 
• Having classes as a whole post comments, do research together. At school, Matt has encouraged teachers to use the blog as a jumping off point to do some real research. I make a point to ask lots of questions in my posts, and our other guest writers have followed suit. The ideal scenario is when students take the initiative to answer some of these questions. 

What still needs work (or didn’t work perfectly the first time around): 

• Getting the students to write — and not just read. We do get lots of great comments and questions from students, but not as many as we’d like. We’re trying to gently steer students away from their top three: “Did you have fun?” “What did you eat?” and “What was the weather like?”
• As a librarian, I feel the need to try to improve students’ research skills whenever possible. We’ve had some success, but I am confident we can do better. 
• Using Blogger as a hosting platform was not ideal. It was a great way to get the blog up and running in a few minutes, but there were lots of problems with the implementation, particularly within an elementary school setting. On the admin side, Blogger is clunky. It’s cumbersome to upload photos, which quickly grew tiresome. It doesn’t support tiered commenting. However, the biggest issue for using Blogger within an educational context — particularly for elementary school — is the “Next Blog” button that is automatically placed at the top of each blog. Clicking that button takes the user to a random blog that may not be appropriate for young students. (It is possible to disable that bar by editing a bit of CSS code.) Our solution has been to migrate to a Wordpress site that we host ourselves. All around, it is a vast improvement. 

The other item to note (although it is not at all a surprise), is that maintaining the blog is time consuming. The best workflow we’ve devised so far is to have guest “hosts” write their posts and provide us with either a PowerPoint file or a Word file that somehow indicates what sentences go with each photo. PowerPoint works well — one slide per photo, explanatory text underneath — but it takes a bit of time for us to copy, paste, and upload into WordPress. It’s definitely worth the time, but we’re hoping to streamline the process. 

Right now, Kirby is in Iraq being hosted by a U.S. soldier stationed there. Before that, he went to the dentist to learn about dental hygeine. That posting, plus his first post from Iraq, should be online soon. Katie is going to Costa Rica later this month, Carlyle just returned from New York City, and Kyle is headed to Boston soon. This experience is giving students an opportunity to learn about different places, cities, countries — places where most of them will never see first hand. And we’re doing it in a way that’s relatable for the students. 

On a personal level, I’ve enjoyed traveling with Kyle. It has forced me to reflect on my experiences traveling, and consider my experiences from an entirely new perspective. We have lots of big plans for the crocodiles for the upcoming year, and I can’t wait to learn about Kirby’s trip to Iraq. I may be more excited than the students! 

The blog: http://www.kylecrocodile.com

This post is tagged blogs, Kyle the Crocodile, web2.0

This post was written by Abby Clobridge