Blogging is easy. Managing blogs for students? Well, that’s something else.
Posted by Paul Allison on February 27th, 2007
See the Google Notebook for this week’s Webcast.
A couple of weeks ago, Lynne Culp, Tech Liaison for the UCLA Writing Project, asked us to have a webcast about “the current state of classroom blogs.” Lynne said that the “fellows” in her Writing Project “need to hear how folks are actually managing blogs and setting them up currently.”
Lynn detailed some problems she is currently having with using Edublogs
- you have to pay now
- our existing blogs with this service continue to have problems
- the time it takes me to moderate comments on the edublogs because the comments include porn, ads, and a variety of spam
- (See James Farmer’s response in the comments below.)
Lynne and her colleagues “went to other sites and… found that it was a totally different mechanism for set up. Some sites charge if you want to select color background on your blog, for example…”
Before she switches from Edublogs Lynne would “like some good feedback and questions answered.” The teachers she is working with “don’t want to pay…and they do want to try something good for their students.” She wonders, “Is this now a double-bind?”
We agree with Lynne that “It would be terrific to hear what other teachers are doing.”
The day after Lynne’s request, Bud Hunt, Tech Liaison for the Colorado State University Writing Project, did some “wondering” on the National Writing Project’s Tech Liaison’s Listserv. Bud asked “what role the National Writing Project could play in both helping students and teachers to incorporate blogging and other technologies into schools… Maybe, just maybe, the NWP should/could/might consider getting into the hosting and tech support business.”
Why would the NWP want to do this? Bud suggests that perhaps “helping folks to obtain good quality, minimal spam/spam-free hosting for onlineprojects, Moodles, Elggs, blogs, podcasts, etc, might be a good foothold for getting into schools and working with teachers to improvewriting instruction.”
Bud boldly imagines some of the details of his proposal, but perhaps this quote reveals that the “the devil is in the details.”
Say a school wanted the technical help and the hosting to set up a school-wide Moodle. In exchange for a reasonable fee, might the NWP, or a local site, build/host the site, and teach folks to use it? In addition, that training might also include some writing instruction on how to incorporate such technological tools into a school-based plan for writing. Or, can we find a way to give away some technical expertise and training in exchange for a access to a building in order to run a professional development series at a school?
Bud is wondering if both local sites and the National Writing Project might add “providing resources” to its “professional development.” And it’s a good question. If anybody knows how teachteachers, it’s the teachers of the Writing Project. Along with Bud, we recognize that learning about technology “isn’t just about the technology—but also about how to use it appropriately and in the support of good writing instruction.”
Of course, Bud is “curious about others’ thoughts,” and he’s aware that there would be “lots of obstacles” to his proposal. “But,” he asks, “are they worth exploring?” We think they are, which is why we are happy that But was able to accept our invitation to join us on this weeks webcast.
Also joining us will be Christina Cantrill, a program associate for technology with the National Writing Project. Christina thinks that Lynne and Bud have begun is a great conversation. She thinks the conversation is “about how teachers, especially networks of teachers (either local or national), could work with development partners to create tools that support classroom practice.” Christina reminds us that “these are complicated partnerships, they need to be ongoing, and are a really different kind of commitment that require really listening and paying attention to needs and abilities.” Christina will help us to have “a conversation about how teachers, particularly those connected through face-to-face and even virtual learning communities, can both leverage knowledge and build relationships in a way that can support systems and tool development with IT folks to serve children in schools — that conversation itself would be something the leadership of organizations (including local and national writing projects) could wrap their minds around.”
Here’s one example of what Christina is talking about. This summer, after collaborating the year before on a blogging and podcasting project with Chris Sloan from the Utah Writing Project, Paul Allison and Susan Ettenheim from the New York City Writing Project asked Dave Cormier, of WorldBridges to sponsor an elgg for their students. This project, YouthVoices.net, grew quickly, with nearly 800 students from six different high schools registering in the first six months. Currently, all of the teachers using YouthVoices.net are from five different Writing Projects across the country.
These teachers have blogged with their students using Manila software in the past, as part of a NWP blogging project. YouthVoices.net is a complex partnership. An “elgg”(named after a town in Switzerland) is an open source Web application combining elements of weblogging, e-portfolios, and social networking to produce what its creators (David Tosh and Ben Werdmuller) term a “personal learning landscape.” It’s in this community of developers at elgg.net that this open-source software is being developed. This partnership is even more complicated, because YouthVoices.net is hosted and maintained by David Cormier and Jeff Lebow, sponsors of WorldBridges.com. Dave Cormier, on whose server the site lives, has begun to think about how we can continue to grow, perhaps by approaching funders. Complex, yes, indeed.
There are many other stories of partnerships like this one to tell. This is why we’ve invited and have commitements from the following people–in addition to Bud Hunt and Christina Cantrill–to join us on the webcast:
- Gail Desler, Tech Liaison from Area 3 Writing Project, CA, to describe her work with Edublogs.
- Eric Hoefler, Tech Liaison from the Northern Virginia WritingProject, to describe his work with Joomla and to check out his “dream machine school tool suite” (See his wiki at http://hoefler.wikispaces.com/tech+dreams.)
- Paul Oh to provide historical and national perspective along with Christina.
Of course one of the exciting things about a live webcast is that anybody can contact us at http://edtechtalk.com to jump in with their stories!
How did we get here? Behind Lynne’s “double-bind”–about how she can get her fellow teachers a reliable, easy-to-use, free blogging service–lie a lot of questions about leadership, relationships, institutions, and funding. So even though there is no free lunch around blogging we need more conversations–like the one we will be having on this webcast–in which people describe successful partnerships that make blogging sustainable for more of our students and Writing Project colleagues.
February 28th, 2007 at 6:45 am
Sorry to hear that you have problems.
Please let me reassure you though that edublogs are still entirely free and ad free (it’s only if you want to host your own ‘edublogs in a box’ that we charge (i.e. if you want to run your own site just like edublogs.org there’s a charge).
Also, as regards spam, simply turning on the Akismet plugin will solve 99.9% of your spam issues, the reason we don’t provide this as standard is that the it’d cost far too much for an enterprise license for tens of thousands of blogs.
And I’d really like to know what is meant by: “our existing blogs with this service continue to have problems” - we provide active forums: http://edublogs.org/forums to help with any issues and I’ll personally help out if need be.
I know we’re not perfect - bit then a free, ad free, service to over 65,000 teachers and students is hard to maintain and we’re always trying to improve - but it’d be great to get some constructive feedback as to how we can improve and be able to correct some misconceptions about the service.
Cheers, James
February 28th, 2007 at 6:47 am
As you don’t have a subscribe to comments option please feel free to contact me on james /at/ edublogs (dot) org
February 28th, 2007 at 8:36 am
I apologize for any inaccuracies. I was aiming to represent Lynne’s frustrations. Your service seems like an option that many Writing Project teachers are turning to. Gail Desler will be representing it very positively on the webcast tonight (unless she has to deal with a sickness in her family)… If you are available and would like to join us we would be excited to add your voice to our conversation about finding IT partners and resources — focused mainly on blogging… for Writing Project teachers and their students.
Thanks for taking the time to respond.
February 28th, 2007 at 12:18 pm
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February 28th, 2007 at 12:39 pm
James, you might recognize me as Blogwalker. You and Cerebraloddjobs were right there for me last week when I was having a few issues with the flash player when uploading a podcast. Three things that really impressed the teachers in my Weblogs in the Classroom workshop were 1) the bells n’ whistles in Edublogs - for free 2) being able to upload a podcast in Edublogs - for free and 3) the Edublogs forum, where they saw the responses (quick responses!) to my questions - for free.
I hope you will be able to join us tonight!
February 28th, 2007 at 4:41 pm
Will do my best (presuming I’m not already too late
March 9th, 2007 at 1:16 pm
I am looking for a free, yet good educational blog site that teachers can create and maintain a classroom blog and students can be invited without having to give out an email address. Anyone have some suggestions?
I know November Learning has one that is good, yet I hear now they are charging.
March 26th, 2007 at 3:21 pm
Wordpress.com has met all of my expectations for a teacher blog… no ads, categorized posts, moderated comments, free, many attractive themes, easy to use, frequent new features, will allow upload of images/DOC/PPT/PDF. It is not, strictly speaking, an “educational” blog site, but I prefer it over blogger or November Learning.
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