The student blogs are ready to go. Many of the students were able to log in and change the title and template. I seem to have only made one error in setting up the passwords. Fortunately, since the accounts all have my email address, it was easily rectified using Bloggers password recovery system.
The students seem apprehensive to write for a real audience. As one told Tammy today, “I don’t think this is going to be as fun as you think it is.” I hope she’s wrong!
I showed Tammy how to set up the blogs and she created her own. Being a digital native, she quickly found her way around the dashboard and was soon creating posts and publishing them.
This weekend I need to create the info packet so that students may successfully log on from home, update the database, and give Tammy and Jabiz a copy of the database so they will be able to access the blogs to give final editing and then give approval to publish. I also want to take a stab at creating a rubric. Tammy will need to finalize it because she is the one giving the writing grade.
I hope that on Monday Tammy is able to teach the 6-traits lesson prior to the students visiting the lab. I figure we can get started drafting that day. I love that posts can be saved as drafts. I think that feature is much better than starting in MS Word or in Text Edit and copying it in when they are done.
Good News! Ann at Shanghi International School has offered to let her grade 5 students visit our blogs. Now I have two student groups and a number of teachers all willing to read and respond to the blogs. That should be enough.
Jabiz took a look at the student blog template and is willing to help me make a few changes to each students’ so that we have a sidebar of links to the blogs of each student in the class. That should make it easy for them and for our visitors to easily navigate to each blog. I may also create a page in my .Mac account or on a Schoolnotes page that lists all the blogs.
Wondering how to make it easy for Tammy, Jabiz and I to stay on tops of the posts. I may set up an RSS reader for Tammy. I think there is a Firefox extension that acts as an RSS reader. I’ll check into that. I’d rather not add the student blogs to my regular RSS reader.
I’m also wondering the best tools for tracking this project. If it were just me doing it, I’d set up a database on my PDA to track posts, responses and comments. That has worked well for courses I’ve taught in the past that had an online component. However, Tammy is the one who will be giving the grades so we need to develop a system that works for her. I wish I had a forum of teachers to discuss this with who incorporate blogs into their classes. I’m certain they have figured out good management strategies.
Thanks to a good start from Bud Hunt’s blog AUP wiki, I finished the information letter/permission form. Hopefully it went home on Wednesday. Writing it was tricky because our school is in an ambiguous place with its own AUP. We were transitioning from an opt in to an opt out policy, but then changes in administration caused it to all slip through the cracks. To be safe and respectful, I basically recreated the school’s AUP within my Blogging permission form and requested both the parent and the child to sign the form as proof that they had read, understood and agreed to uphold it.
Next I created a database to house all the account info for each student blog. I also created a settings file with notes on how they are being set up. Then I began setting up the student blogs. I was hoping to finish creating the student accounts tonight so that the students could go in tomorrow and change the template and choose a name for their blog. I figured getting to do something with their blogs would be motivating enough that any stragglers would bring in their permission forms the next day. However, Blogger is having trouble tonight and I received a message saying that engineers had been informed. I guess that means I get to go to bed instead of working late.
Blog Policy
Now that I’ve quit whining about the lack of ready-made resources available on the web, I’ve finally gotten down to work on creating what I need. I met with Tammy to work through a number of questions I had. This project is starting to take shape!
We have decided that she will sign up for two blogging sessions per week in the computer lab. These are above and beyond her regularly scheduled computer times; we don’t want this project to shut down the rest of our curriculum. Each week she will teach a 6-trait writing lesson. After the lesson, students create a writing project and use what they learned in the mini lesson to craft the piece. Students need to have the piece reviewed by a teacher before they may push the publish button. I’m hoping our weekly due dates are not too optimistic.
I’ve started setting up the student blogs, but ran into a glitch when one wouldn’t finish– the computer spent 20 minutes telling me to please wait while the blog was created. I hope that was a one-time problem.
Tonight I’ve been drafting the parent letter. I have the first page done. Hopefully I can polish it up tomorrow morning.
Does MS Word rewrap itself when posted to Blogger? It would be most convenient if it did. Of course, since blogger allows posts to be saved in draft form, we do not really need to start in MS Word. And by using the draft feature, we won’t have to worry about transferring the files between home and school if the students want to continue working on a piece.
Too much time spent online today. I just can’t believe there are not more practical resources online to help me explain the project to parents, gain parent permission, and get students off to a good start.
One reason for the lack of resources online may be that the majority of educational blogging assignments seems to be in high school or higher ed. I suspect they just use their AUP and don’t need to specifically inform families.
Another reason is probably that few (if any) schools have blogging established at a district level, and it is districts, not individual teachers who usually put resources online. Usually when I am searching for resources online, such as a UbD template or a rubric, it has been posted by a professional development person working at the district level. And to be fair, the large number of materials my colleagues and I develop are not available online; they are only on our school server.
And so, I’ve spent a precious Sunday not finding what I need and not creating what I need. Now I’m really feeling a time crunch. I’ll see what I can create tonight before sleep overtakes me.
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