Miss W. and her Smartboard

This post has been written on “tips for using blogs with students” as part of The Edublogger’s Birthday Celebration Competition!

Sue tweeted back that I could use a previous post as long as there was a pingback, but nah …. I’ll start afresh.

I began last year using a blog myself (this one) but felt it would be a great way to get students involved in the writing process when school went back.  I spent time trying to find other Tasmanian schools that were blogging but I had no luck in that. This meant it was going to be new to both me and the computer techie guys at school and perhaps to the Education Department (our Premier does have a facebook account I think).

The department wanted me to use the sharepoint but I had heard that the blogging setup on that was not easy to use and would certainly not let the world enter easily. But that was why I wanted my students to blog – to open their minds and souls to people in other parts of the world.

So I settled on Edublogs and the steep learning journey began. After students had shown me they were internet savvy, they earned the right to their own blog if they wished to have one. I wrote posts to help the students set up their blogs;  I set up a few rules about keeping their blog; we looked at tips for other teachers starting to blog with their students; hints for commenting well and so on. 

My favourite tips for using blogs with students would be:

• Make sure they know how to be internet savvy and teach as situations arise with the blogging eg bad comments, attibution of images etc.
• Allow students as much control as possible over their own blogs with you as a co-administrator/moderator etc ready to help or intercede when required.
• Use a classblog to give students ideas of what they could write about or join a student blogging challenge (hint hint, I ran one last year and have started a new one this year to begin in March.)
• Allow students to write about things that interest them, not always work to do with school – allow their talents to shine in their blog eg interviewing people they are interested in.
• Organise with other teachers for students to comment on each others blogs – easily done through the student blogging challenge or having a great list on your blogroll in your sidebar

Well I have just been signing up more students, in classes that I teach, to the Edublogs platform.  But as they won’t be supporters, this means they will have ads appearing on their blogs. 

How can I get rid of these ads? 

Write some posts celebrating Sue Waters’ achievement of one year editing the Edublogger. Hopefully I might win one, or if I am extremely lucky two, free 12 month supporter subscriptions, then I can disable ads on more student blogs.

Check out first what the competition has already written about … notice many of the students from last year’s blogging challenge have written about their favourite widgets, and how to write great comments and how to build your audience.  So to make my chances of winning better, I will leave out those topics. (Also gives the students a great chance to win – I love reading their posts from last year ….) 

OK – what to choose now!! I could write about these topics:

Tips for using blogs with students

Ideas for getting educators involved with using web technology

Advice on setting up or using class blogs

Tips for connecting with other classrooms

Images generators (e.g. sign generators, newspaper generators), avatars, online graph tools etc that you can use with students

Just sent a twitter message to Sue – can I use a post I have already written eg avatars, using blogs with students or do I have to write a totally new post for the competition?  I suppose it would be cheating to use one I had already written but then blogging is all about linking to posts to make the conversation move along so maybe it is really being efficient to use a pre written post.