Student blogs...

I am a fifth grade teacher. This year, I just have a classroom blog, and the students add comments to it. I'm considering expanding it next year, but where to go...

I'm on edublogs, I could create accounts for the kids, keep one blog, and have them be contributors. I could create learnerblog accounts, and have each of them have their own blogs. Or, I could try ning, but I'm not sensing enough in the controls arena. I could look at classblogmeister, but I have to request that it be unblocked by my district (I know, many of you are now rolflolpimp, hearing that).

Suggestions?

Tags: blog_admin, class_blogs, edublogs, elementary, student_blogs

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Permalink Reply by Lisa Parisi on May 19, 2007 at 6:01pm

I joined classblogmeister. I found the learning curve for me very short and for the students (also fifth graders) almost nil. I also find them using it constantly and have made many connections with other classes through the collaborative part of the site, as well as the newsgroup. The children each create their own blog page off my main page and all activity, blogs and comments, is approved by me, which I love.

http://classblogmeister.com/blog.php?blogger_id=88116

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Permalink Reply by Nancy Bosch on July 30, 2007 at 6:41pm

I'm lucky, I had a student's dad that designed a blog using Drupel and serves it free of charge so we can put in all the safeguards. I'm using Blogger for my personal blogs and they seem safe so far...I monitor daily and haven't had any problems. You can check out our classroom blog here http://areallydifferentplace.org

One place you could start is with a book discussion. You could post the questions and students could respond. I've done this several times using Blackboard.com and this year we are going to try one as a blog---just now getting it set up and haven't added the questions yet but it's easy to find high level questions for books online. We may read Treasure Island http://robertlewisstevenson.blogspot.com I haven't slogged throught it yet---I might change to Peter Pan or something more contemporary like Peter and the Starcatchers or Airborn but you get the idea. It's a good intro to online discussions.

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Permalink Reply by Julia Osteen on July 30, 2007 at 7:07pm

I am very happy with class blogmeister also. It offers many safeguards that help the parents be at ease with this type of activity. I teach 6th graders. My class blog is here http://classblogmeister.com/blog.php?blogger_id=17192