Jan. 3, 2022
Each month we highlight a #MashoftheMonth, focussing on a tool or application within Purple Mash and how it can be used within the classroom to support learning across the curriculum. During the month, if you share how you have used #MashoftheMonth on Twitter or Facebook, you will then be entered into a draw to win a 2Simple Goody Bag!
This January the Mash of the Month is 2Blog.
What better way to start the term than setting up a blog for your school, class, or group to share the amazing work that takes place in school with the wider school community or to have a particular focus, for example a reading blog. Over the last 18 months, especially during lockdown, 2Blog was used extensively by schools and we listened to your feedback to update and add a range of features to ensure it was a powerful and versatile tool for schools to make use of. Updated features include the ability to attach multiple items, scheduling blog posts and recording sound. You can find out more about the updated features here.
How you use 2Blog is totally up to you. The main way that we have seen schools use 2Blog is to set up blogs for their whole school or their class. This is a great way of showcasing all the excellent work happening in your classroom and enables you to share this work with the wider school community. Blogs can either be set as private or public – it is up to you as the teacher how visible you would like the blogs to be. If your staff are new to blogging, there is a great course within our training platform that covers sharing online work as well as a 2Blog guide that covers all you need to get started with 2Blog within school.
Over the last year we have loved hearing how schools have been making use of 2Blog within their environment. St Paul of the Cross school set up a Whole School Reading blog, where children can upload the books that they are reading at home, with reviews of what they have read. The blog is not public and has been set to be viewed only by the children and parents of their school using their logins. Quarry Hill Academy has also set up a birthday blog so that children in different year groups can celebrate birthdays that happen within their class and leave messages for each other.
These are just some of the creative ways that you can use 2Blog as a school. Some other ideas include setting up the following:
Within 2Blog, pupils can also create their own blogs, which is a great way of them sharing their passions or interest both inside and outside school. They may want to set up a Gaming blog, one that covers their favourite sport or a hobby that they do. Pupil Blogs are not made visible to anyone other than the creating pupil and their teacher unless the teacher sets the blog to be viewable to others.