Rick Barter’s comment on yesterday’s post led me to do some digging at his Conners Emerson School site and I found some really valuable resources. It’s great to see other educators thinking through this stuff to the degree Rick and his colleagues are. For instance, this page starts with
One of the challenges for this grade 8 project was the setup. We had to consider many factors such as:
It goes on to run through many of the relevant questions we have to answer about student blogging and how they are approaching the answers. For instance,
“we want discussion enabled, but not membership There is just a bit too much risk in opening this up to uncontrolled public comment.”
And so they set all of their members up manually and close it off to outsiders. There’s much more too. (He even has them using Bloglines to keep track of posts.) Aside from logistics, check out the Grade 5 Poetry Journal, the teacher sites, and the list of student blogs which are just getting started.
The best part of this is that the schools we’re finding are using Manila! I’m going to try to catch up with Michael Breidenstein from Rock Island later today and pick his brain. I’ll blog it for future reference.
—–