I got an email last night and it read:
Thanks so much for what you are doing with my daughter this year. She considered herself a so-so writer but now she says that she has strategies to make her great. Every afternoon, she runs in the house and before she does any thing else she goes to her blog and begins writing. Yesterday, to my surprise she was reading a comment posted on her blog. The person told her about all of the things that they loved about her writing and how that moment that she shared made them feel the same way too. When I asked her who the "Gran Writer" was, she smiled and said,"It's Nanna!" I could not believe that she got her grandmother (who used to write before we were born) to blog!
Thanks for making my daughter a writer!
But today we were asked to "temporarily" take down the class blog. Apparently a parent felt that a student mentioning where they live (country) in a posting, leaves them open to predators. I explained to the administration that their is no personal information on the profile and that the only blog readers are the students who's email addresses are in the permissions settings on the blogs. Search engine can not locate the blog and it will not appear in blog listings. I went on to say that every comment had to be moderated by me, but at that point, I might as well have been speaking Arabic.
They listened but admitted to being technologically un-savvy and chose to shut it down until they were 100 % certain no one else could see the site.
I then had the daunting task or explaining to the student why they will no longer be able to post to the class blog. They listened and then asked if they could continue their own blogs. It made my heart swell to know how important writing and commenting on each others writing has become to them.
So for now, our writing challenges will be posted in their Writing Challenges Notebook.
4 comments:
That is disappointing. I just went to a workshop on setting up class blogs. I would be very annoyed if I went to all that work and then the admins shut it down. Good luck getting it back!
I wonder if you could make it a private blog with only those invited able to see. I think you can do this on blogger and then you could send invitations just to parents.
You can make blogs private. I hope you consider trying to educate administration and parents. Our children are part of the technology age and who in their own mind would want to stifle a child's desire to express their creativity and improve their communication skills.
Rather than be afraid, we need to educate ourselves. Good luck.
I know this is an old post/comment, but I noticed that those who are afraid of blogging/bloggers/blogs tend to be of a certain age and mindset.
Hang in there. I'm fighting this battle on other fronts as well, but I think blogging is here to stay. Wonderful story about your student--thanks for sharing it.
--Elizabeth
http://peninkpaper.blogspot.com/
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