Third Year mayhem
Got the third years to set up their own blog and now we’re doing summaries of different input/output devices on them. It’s good for me as I get an RSS feed of all the entries aggregated for me! So far so good with this - though one candidate has referred to himself as ih8computing 
. Working on him to change that of his own accord.
The blog is pupil comment only. I’m going to keep it that way, and use our older third year blog for public posts.
Here’s a link to the Third year blog cluster and The old blog
I’m going to program a wee auto-magic RSS reader that displays these entries in a dictionary layout, ready for printing. So if they can have their own entries for everything in a certain topic, they can print it out. Should even be able to do this by using the categories on the blog.
I know a few bloggers out there are very up-to-date on internet safety. Let me know what you think of that particular blog cluster host - does it look safe to you? My only concern is that I am moderating post-publish. There is no option to have a moderation queue for entries. I think this will work fine as I am checking the work as it is posted, but is this too much of a risk?
Hi Pete,
The only problem with the host I can see is the ads, if you can live with them it looks fine.
We been blogging without post moderation for a while now, in the past not too much of a problem as I\’ve only had about 4 posts per day at the max, but now I have a class with a blog each I was a bit more worried, you can\’t really see 20 odd posts in an hour and some of my kids have started posting from home. But I guess primary pupils are easier to keep in line, I mainly worry about spelling and sense.
We have had open commenting on our main blogs since they started and I think I\’ve only deleted a couple of unpleasant comments, apart from auto generated comment spam which was a problem a while back.
Same thing here, really. I wouldn’t want to second guess the kids’ behaviour, but of course it might seem funny to write something rude on it because it’s on the internet. However, I do think that they know it’s for school. I suppose I’m willing to give it a try, just hope it turns out to be a positive thing all round.
Hi Pete,
I\’m impressed, though like John I\’d have reservations on allowing ads on to an Educational site/pupil blogs… especially if you have no control over what adverts are placed there.
If you have your own server, you could consider a WPMU installation. Very straightforward to do, and gives you just about all the control you need.
One thing I would say (and I know you\’ll have covered this) is that you need to teach the pupils what is and isn\’t acceptable on an Education blog… I spend a lot of time stressing that the pupils\’ blogs are an extension of the classroom (and in my case, that\’s an English classroom so I don\’t accept txt language!). If the pupils want to use txt and post bad language, they are free to do that in their own time on their Bebo/MySpace/Facebook/etc…
I\’ve also got ours set up so that they have to agree to the terms and conditions before they sign up. Feel free to have a look - http://blogs.perthacademy.net - and to reference if you wish… most of our guidelines are based on other people\’s guides so I am pleased to return the favour!
Cheers!
sir wiy yi roe abt me ??
no ma fault a choose tht nme eh