Miss W. and her Smartboard

Being a virtual newbie to blogging (only started personally in January 2008 and with students February 2008), I wondered how safe was it going to be to introduce blogging to students.  No-one else in my school had done this before so I was virtually “on my own”.

I looked at the Australian Government website about internet safety, ran lessons and activities for the students about being internet savvy digital citizens then finally decided to have a go at blogging with the consent of parents.  I still have a couple of students who have not brought back that form so they can only make comments on our class blog.  They will not be allowed to write posts or have their own blog.

Then I decided to look at some statistics relating to blogging.  How likely was it that someone would find our class blog or my own personal blog? Technorati seemed to have the most up-to-date data I could find.  WOW!! I was going to be one in 70 million blogs around the world. How would someone ever find our blogs?  That’s like trying to find me in three times the population of Australia.  Miss W, where are you?

Thank goodness I had made my blog using edublogs.  At least I was with a group of like minded people with education as their main interest.  I had been blogging for about a week when I wrote a post about “Why has nobody commented?”  Suddenly, bloggers were coming into my blog.  Sue Waters, of the Edublogger fame, had “twittered” about my post.  Now I was being given lots of clues as to how I could build up that network of people who might visit my blog on a regular basis.

I needed to build up a PLN (Personal Learning Network); a group of people who would help answer my queries and guide me in my learning about Web 2.0 technologies that I was using with my students. I joined Classroom 2.0 ning as well as a Smartboard teachers ning.

So back to the main topic: safety in blogging.  Would anyone have found my blog or the class blog if I hadn’t used that network of educationalists who were prepared to share their learning with me?  Maybe we would have been safer just having the other students from our class writing comments.  But the thrill I see in students faces when they realise someone from a grade 8 class in New Zealand has written something in their blog makes it all worthwhile. Blogging is all about writing for an audience and with 21st century students needing to be global students, why should we be limiting them to just their local community?