After all my deliberating about how to get student blogs approved, I may have come in through the back door.
The families of the students I teach are wanting more communication from school and are frustrated that some of their children are not yet using their plan books to write down all their assignments. To remedy these problems, I created assignment calendars in iCal and published them using my .Mac account. Then I created a team blog here in Blogger and made sidebar links to the calendars.
I introduced the blog and the calendars at our parent-teacher conferences last week. At that time, I mentioned to the families of my communications class, that we will start student blogs this fall. I explained the safeguards available in Blogmeister and our own blogging privacy policy. Families seemed interested and none seemed stressed at this point. However, I was not able to meet with all the families of the students in my communications class since we conference with our homerooms.
Thus far I’ve posted team news on the blog, but hopefully I’ll be able to start having students first help me write and then take over writing a summary of our day. It feels good to be blogging on the job again.
Good luck! It’s such a tough area to break into with so many horror stories being in the news. Can’t wait to hear what you wind up doing with it.