Experiencing blogging, using a smartboard and genealogy
Having run a student blogging competition over the last ten weeks, I have found some fantastic students and classes blogging around the world. These are my nominations for the 2008 Edublog Awards:
Best individual blog - Nadine
Best new blog - Huzzah
Best educational tech support - The Edublogger
Best resource sharing blog - Larry Ferlazzo
Best teacher blog - Inpi
Best educational wiki - Edorigami
I am about to start a student blogging competition with students from many countries of the world ranging from age eight to sixteen. One of the first activities will relate to being internet savvy and not using a photo of yourself on your blog.
Most students love creating their own avatars but many of the sites I visited courtesy of this wiki, had terms of service saying students under 13 could not register and those 13 and over had to have parental or guardian permission.
Students also love adding widgets like clocks, counters, flags, translators, maps to the sidebars of their blogs. Again many of these are only for students 13 and older. Yet I see many of these on blogs for students in primary grades.
Personally, I use my class blog to show students what they can be putting on their blog, but I also write a post whenever I add something new. In this post I mention about the age minimum, mainly because my students age from 11-13 so some can use the sites and others can’t. I find the students who can’t yet use say a feedjit map are quite content with their clustrmap. Come a 13th birthday though and first thing that student wants is to spend time on their blog adding the new widgets.
When I check the blogrolls and widgets on my students’ blogs, I also point out if they are recommending a site where you have to be 13 or older, when the student is younger than that. I then ask them to remove that from their blogroll.
As teachers, what is our responsibility with regard to students using these sites?
Shouldn’t we leave some sites for students to use when they do turn 13?
Original image: ‘3:30 PM-Web Team Works After School‘
http://www.flickr.com/photos/83955435@N00/7701596
by: Judy Baxter
Released under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License
Hosted by Edublogs.
