Comments on: New year dilemma

By: daniel1231

daniel1231 — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 04:29:01 +0000

hi my name is daniel my blog site is daniel1231.edublogs.org.

By: Mr Gray

Mr Gray — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 02:54:42 +0000

Have appreciated your post and the comments left behind. I am thinking of starting up a blog with an infants class and was debating whether to get a name for just this class, or one which would suit many classes. I think I like the idea of building up the blog over many years.

By: Peter

Peter — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 22:45:44 +0000

Keeping multiple blogs is extra work. Using the same blog will give your class a (small) sense of history.

Good luck!

By: Miss W.

Miss W. — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 03:41:00 +0000

One way for the school to have a ‘traditional’ type blog would be for me to start one for the grade 6/7 students in total and run it similarly to the http://studentfriends.edublogs.org one we have going at the moment from the blogging competition. Each teacher and class could have the ownership for a fortnight and each year the new classes would just continue the tradition. Mmmmm …… brain is ticking over ….. great way to introduce teachers to blogging ……

By: Miss W.

Miss W. — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 03:34:53 +0000

Thank you all for your comments and reasoning. I would love to continue the ‘tradition’ of blogging with my classes, but with only two more years before retirement maybe a new blog for this year’s class. I will certainly add this year’s class in the blogroll as with my other blogs, but a fresh start….

I also think I will run the class blog as a true class blog with the students doing a lot of the posting and only organizing the individual blogs later in the year.

By: Sue Waters

Sue Waters — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 00:34:46 +0000

I like Paul’s analogy of baseball and class blogging. I think this is the approach that Al Upton did with the miniLegends. The class blog had the same URL but the students had their own blogs. Former miniLegends wear their badge with honor and network with new miniLegends to support them.

So taking this all into account perhaps this new group could come up with a name that could be used with all future groups and the blog title could be changed to reflect this since “Technology in our Classroom” isn’t a title for this type of tradition

By: murcha

murcha — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 22:09:45 +0000

Hi Sue, I am going to keep my old blog going. However, I am in a unique situation in that teach across so many year levels that it probably does no look like a class blog anyway. There is a wealth of material accumulated there from last year, with tutorials and samples that any new students to me can use.
Unfortunately, I do not have any primary year levels next year so their links on my blogroll will be archived to a page with a heading that I am yet to think of. So much work has gone into my initial blog and like Andrew Douch above, I am sure I will continue to get comments form older, retired members.

By: Mrs C

Mrs C — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 08:28:41 +0000

I’ve recently set up my 3rd annual class blog, but I am hoping it’s for the last time. This year I need a new one because I am changing providers (switching from Edublogs) and I am moving into a 2 teacher learning studio, so it will no longer be “my” grade but “our” grade. So we need “our” blog.
My kids in the past have appreciated the new blog – they’ve chosen the theme, widgets and much of the content. They know the visitor count and clustrmaps are just for their work.
But a new blog means you do lose your old readers – I’ve noticed that my 2007 blog got far more visitors last year than the 2008 blog, because word (and Google) had spread. A new blog means starting from scratch. Also, it’s a lot of work to get the new sidebars, links, theme, etc, set up to your liking – keeping the old blog solves that issue! We had past students visit the new blog by following the link, but I think they’d have taken more interest if it had been their blog as well.
I think I will keep last year’s wiki, but maybe delete some of the old pages.

By: Penny Ryder

Penny Ryder — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 08:18:26 +0000

It’s been great to read these comments. I haven’t started a class blog yet, but plan to start this year. Your comments have helped me to realise the importance of creating a blog title that can be used by more than one group of kids. I’m going to think carefully about how I set it up so that I can use it with different groups over time.

By: Kim

Kim — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 06:52:24 +0000

I agree with Toni and Paul!
You can change the theme, add new header etc but keep the same blog and all it contains.
As Paul points out, the kids have a sense of responsibility to take the blog (and its readers) on and keep going.