Last night, yet another learning experience arose in which the adults learned far more than the children are probably learning from this experience. At some point, that will alarm me, but not yet.
It all began so simply. Our administrator was kind enough to drop into the blogs and leave lengthy, humorous comments. The problem arose when she signed it only as “a faculty member at ___” and listed the name of our school.
She was having a great time, and knew the children would have fun trying to figure out who had left the messages. Because we are all so new to blogging, we did not immediately spot two potential problems that Tammy and I eventually identified.
- She had listed the name of our school, which is something we had taught our students that they may not do for safety reasons.
- She had posted anonymously from within the school.
Our guests will need to use the anonymous option to leave their comments, since they do not have Blogger accounts, but we have asked them to sign their first names and the country they are writing from. We have asked our students to sign in before leaving comments because they should proudly own their words and be identified as the authors of them. We do not want them leaving unsigned comments for each other– we’ve all had too much experience over the years of note passing gone bad and damaging the community rather than building it. We had no desire to replicate those problems here.
Once Tammy spoke with her, our administrator was worried about her comments. At that point we discovered that if you leave an anonymous comment, you cannot go back in and edit or delete it. Fortunately, since we have the students’ passwords, we are able to go, copy the comment, publish it as new comment sans the troublesome moniker, and delete the original. Luckily, our administrator only had time to leave 5 comments, and our students won’t be blogging again until tomorrow.
We’ve further learned that we need to go in and set all the blogs to e-mail the comments to Tammy as they are posted. She won’t get them first and be able to prevent them from being posted, as she could with BlogMeister, but at least she will have a quick heads up in case any other problem comments are posted. — We’d planned on doing that we when set them up, but somehow it didn’t happen. As I said at the start, it was yet another learning experience for us.
A few guests have visited the student blogs.
Our first guest was Ms. Rosa, our school librarian. She has gone in and left a few comments. She plans to add more as time permits. Her comments have a special richness because she knows the authors and is able to make personal comments. I suspect the students will be surprised and honored to discover that other people in our school are reading their blogs.
Our second guests are bloggers themselves. Mr. Gordon Brune’s fourth grade students have NewsBlogs. They dropped in and left a few comments. I was touched by how many of them asked if we were affected by the tsunami. I guess one moderately good thing to come out of the tsunami is that now when people here about this part of the world, they think tsunami rather than “breeding ground for terrorists” which was the focus of so many western news stories in the past.
I have added the NewsBlogs link to our Schoolnotes page so our students can go in and leave comments for those bloggers. I hope we don’t run into technical difficulties. So many blog sites require the person leaving the comment to include an email address. Our students don’t have school email addresses, and when they tried to all use mine, the blog system caught on and after a few minutes, did not allow any more comments to be posted. It must be an anti-spam system, which I can understand. However, it is getting in the way of legitimate comments.
I think a better option is those codes that appear on the page that must be typed into a special box. I wonder how those are added to a page. I can see a real need for them. Thus far we have been lucky and no spammers have infected our blogs, but it is probably just a matter of time.
For now, rather than anticipating that problem, I will anticipate the delight of our bloggers when they log in Wednesday and see comments from the outside world. A big thanks to all our legitimate guests for giving our students a real audience. We appreciate your time and your thoughts.
One of the reasons we chose to use Blogger for our blogs is its toolbar. The toolbar is very similar to the toolbar on the word processor we use in class. As a result, our students needed very little assistance to use the formatting tools to format their blogs, as their multi-colored posts so clearly demonstrate.
Another reason we chose Blogger was for its spell checker. Most of our students have spelling that is standard enough that the spell checker is able to identify the word they are trying to spell. Unfortunately, the spell checker is only available when drafting posts; it is not available when composing comments, as our students’ comments so clearly show.
Today I learned about Spellbound, an open source spell checker for Firefox that allows you to spell check forms such as message board posts, blog entries and other web page text boxes. I downloaded the extension and installed it. However, when I tried to use it to check a blog comment, it gave me an error message about not being able to find it’s dictionary. I was unable to resolve the problem, but I suspect the cause was that I had just downloaded the newest version of Firefox (v 1.0.4) and Spellbound has not yet been updated to be compatible. We have not yet updated Firefox at school, so I’ll give Spellbound a try there.
Just made a few changes to the students’ blog settings. One change was to allow the comments to appear in a pop up window. Sometimes our connection gets slow in the afternoon. This should make for faster browsing. Hopefully our guests’ pop-up blockers won’t interfere.
Another change was to change the Blogger comment setting for showing profile images on comments. I turned that feature off since only I have an image on my profile and we don’t need the images taking up viewing space.
We’ll monitor these changes for a few days to see if they bring about the desired improvements without creating new problems.
Yesterday I wrote about the students’ first comments on each others’ blogs. What I didn’t mention was that many of the comments were written following the conventions commonly used in chat rooms, text messages and instant messages, full of abbreviations and slang.
My first reaction was a desire to stamp it out. One of our intended purposes of this blogging project is to help the students improve their writing. We already hear the middle school teachers bemoaning the fact that they receive research reports that read like a chat message (e.g. Did u know tigers are *really* kool?)
My second reaction was an attempt to be more broad-minded. The intended audience of their comments uses and appreciates IM English– some of them seem more comfortable reading it than reading standard English. Therefore, wasn’t it most appropriate for them to use it when writing to that particular audience?
This morning, I spoke with Tammy about it this dilemma. She’d already had the same two reactions when she read their comments, and she’d already arrived at a decision. She told her class there was to be no more chat language– standard English was expected in their posts and their comments.
The students were outraged! These were their comments! That was how they wrote! It was their language, their right to comment in that way!
Nope. Many of these kids are already multi-lingual, speaking one language at home, English at school, this other form of English when online. It is time to further broaden their skills and insist that in these blogs, whether they are posting or commenting, they are to craft their writing using the conventions of standard English.
Recognizing when to use the different forms of English, and being able to move smoothly between the different forms is all part of becoming an effective communicator. It will be interesting to see if they accept the challenge of developing this new voice, or if it diminishes their delight in commenting on blogs.
Initial signs are positive; the bloggers returned to the computer lab this afternoon and their work on their new posts was more intense than ever. I am amazed at what they are accomplishing each session. And we have signs that numerous kids are logging in from home to continue working on their drafts. A few have even gone in to better edit their already published posts. Voluntary editing in grade five? Amazing!
Will Richardson responded to my RSS reader woes and suggested I check out Bloglines. I’d visited it before when following links at his Weblogg-ed site but hadn’t spent time figuring out how it works. It is a great tool for teachers who need to track student blogs. What I like most about it is…
- I can share my feeds, so the entire class can use my Blogline as the access point to each other’s blogs, saving me from having to set up a Schoolnotes page or some other portal.
- It will import OPML files.
- It displays the student text in the colors they wrote it.
- It has a clip feature that allows you to clip and store parts of the blogs you are reading.
- Being online, the unread posts markings should be accurate even if I sometimes access it from home and other times access it from school.
I haven’t played around much with the other features, but a quick look has me thinking it can also be a blog hosting site, but I might be wrong about that.
I only see two drawback to using Bloglines to track student blogs. One was that I couldn’t find a way to export the feeds as an OPML file, so if Bloglines should lose my feeds, I’d need to re-enter all my subscriptions. The other is that I didn’t see a way to leave comments in students’ blogs from within Bloglines or to see which blogs have had comments left on them.
I sent the info to Tammy and Jabiz so that they can give it a try in anticipation of next year’s blogs.
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