The Classroom Blog

Unlike the personal blog where you only need to look after yourself, the classroom blog is a bit more complicated. As educators we are charged with keeping our students safe. School districts must comply with the Children’s Internet Safety Act and in doing such must come up with tons of policies. So how do you prepare your students with 21st communication skills and comply with all the rules and regs. This is where I have doing a lot of reading and supposing. Here are my toughts on this matter so far.

• Be open and honest about what you are doing. Explain the process of blogging and the purpose of your classroom blog. Talk to students, teachers, parents and administration.

• Be prepared to support the educational soundness of the project.

• Make sure you and your students are very familiar with the AUP. You may need to come up with a separate document that outlines your expectations.

•Remind them frequently that the work they produce is public. Mom and Dad are looking in.

• Model the way you wish your student to blog

• Provide clear assignments and expectations

• Choose a host/blog service, such as Blogmeister, that will allow you to:
o Moderate posts and comments before they “go live”
o Password protected the blog
o Specify members
o Create usernames that comply with your school’s AUP such as students first name last initial

• Have fun with your students and share their and your successes with others.

What insights do you have to make blogging a good experience for students and teachers? Any thoughts and comments are most welcome.

The Personal Blog

I have been thinking about the concerns one faces when you start a personal blog, be it a professional blog or one for your family members. There are some things you might wish to keep in mind as you post to your blog.

• Would you want your employer or future employer to read your blog? I have heard that colleges “google” the names of future students to see what they have posted about themselves, I am sure some employers already do.

• Would you mind the teacher down the hall reading the blog?

• What about the parents of your students?

• How about your students themselves? I see them “google” the names of their teachers all the time.

Most of us are polite and respectful people and intend no harm to anyone. This does not mean we cannot say what we mean. But we can all slip now and again. We just need to think twice before including a name or writing about a specific situation in our schools or districts. We need to model the behavior we wish our students to follow.

I am still relatively new to this all, what else am I missing, what else should we consider?
Please post your comments.

Preparing teachers to blog

I am feeling a bit overwhelmed. I have been spending a lot of time looking at Web 2.0 tools. The possibilities excite me as I read about the tools and their uses in schools. I follow link after link and discover so much good stuff! I am working on ways to introduce these tools to my fellow teachers. I have played around with blogging, and some different Wikis. I have worked with a few individual teachers on Web 2.0 tools. My focus is now how to pass it on to the faculty in general? The largest issue faced by teachers is the safety of their students. It is not the pedagogy of the tools that is in questions – most teachers I have spoken with embrace the possibilities with gusto. But they are brought up short by the “safety issues.” They want all the concerns address before they begin. Therefore one of my responsibilities is to find solutions to these concerns.

So I went to the source Classroom Blogging: A Teacher’s Guide to the Blogosphere, by David Warlick. Though I could find all the information on the Web there is something special about holding a book in your hands and mulling over the ideas. I needed this read it helped me refocus and put things in perspective. To introduce blogging I feel I will take a two pronged approach. First I will introduce the personal or professional blog, secondly the classroom blog. Both have different concerns, I was starting to get them all tangled up.

For the professional or personal blog I will focus on the tools Bloglines, Blogger and edublogs. I will also introduce RSS feeds and aggregators. Then expand that to the classroom here I will introduce Blogmeister. A blogging program created by David Warlick, part of the Landmark project, that address many of the safety concerns. More later on the concerns faced by each type of blog – personal and classroom. In the end I hope next school year to see more teachers and students joining the great conversation in the Blogosphere.