Miss W. and her Smartboard

I have now been blogging with students in grade 6/7/8 for a year and a half and this week one of my students in grade 6/7 asked me the following question.

Thanks for the comment Miss W.
Do you know who Sara is, who left a comment on my ….. work?

As I moderate all comments on blogs I administer (I use RSS feed on Google Reader to do this as I have about 200 student blogs), I  checked out the person who had left her a comment. The blog was fairly new, and was about using pianos.  I left a comment for the owner of the piano blog, asking how she found this student blog, so will see what happens when I get a reply.  Tonight I emailed the student and said yes it would be OK to approve the comment.

Also this week, one of the grade 8 students received a comment:

Great Cartoon! It would be good if you could get it published especially for kids. Alot of us take our earth for granted.  I’ve got this site:  (name of site excluded) do you think your viewers may be interested?

Again I checked out this site, even though the student had already approved the comment. I though I might use it as an example of how students could verify the suitability of the site for their readers. It was suitable despite being a site for purchasing goods.

Most students in my school are used to only getting comments from me or perhaps some of their classmates.  But next term, I would like to see a lot more of them take part in the international student blogging challenge that I will be organising with Sue Waters.  They will then receive many more comments from students around the world so my job as co-administrator on all their blogs will be a bit more frantic.

How do you deal with comments from unknown people on your class or student blogs?  What do you tell your students to do before they approve the comments?  How do they learn to recognise a spam comment?

Earlier this year, a fellow teacher convinced me to put forward a proposal for a paper to be presented at the ALEA conference in Hobart in July at Wrest Point.  This conference involves literacy and English teachers from all levels of schooling.  I have just been advised that the proposal was accepted, so I will have a one hour workshop to run on the topic:

Blogging safely in the big wide world

What do you think should be the main points I put forward in this workshop?

I would like it to be a practical workshop but am not sure if there is wifi capability at the venue (will check it out this weekend), so will firstly use an off line powerpoint presentation, and hopefully bring some students from my class last year to also participate.

I would like to include other ways of communicating online with examples such as skype, flatclassroom and 1001tales.  Do you know any links to other great examples of collaboration across the world?

Yesterday I sent out a tweet about this and received some links from Anne Mirtschin and John Pearce.

As blogging often is seen as negative, I would like the conference participants to actually get in there and start writing comments on blogs belonging to students to find out how easy it can be to get started.  Do you have any resources for how to make blogging more positive for ‘unsure about technology’ teachers? 

If you have any links for AUP policies regarding blogging, nings and wikis, that might also be handy to use at this workshop.

The reason my fellow teacher convinced me to write the proposal was that I am currently running a student blogging challenge with about 800 students and classes from 13 countries of the world participating.  I ran a similar event in third term last year and had a similar response.  From the first challenge, students asked for a blog to be created and run by their classes and teachers.  Thus was born ‘Bringing us together’.

Original image: ‘How to Design a School Website That People Will Actually Use‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/83955435@N00/299768611
by: Judy Baxter

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