As part of this course, I’ll be going through some of my saved links on blogging, both as a way to expand the course and because it seems like they will be useful for the work / assignments for the class.

Here is one from a teacher in Australia who, it seems, blogs with a teacher in California as part of their elementary curriculum (seems like fourth grade but the AU system might be a bit different). The post itself isn’t particularly practical; it talks more about some of the general issues around blogging. But the link to the class blog itself is quite interesting. Even the most recent post, about her trip to the US to meet her blogging partner for the first time, gives a good sense of how the blog works. And it raised some questions for me about what a blog-used-with-a-class should or could look like.

I had envisioned from the outset that each student would have their own blog, and I suspect that that will still be the case. But some thoughts / ideas that have popped up (as well as some questions): I had never considered a class blog, i.e. a blog that I keep that is about the class and that uses the comment interface as a way to get students involved (which is what the blog mentioned above does). This makes sense of course for younger students but I’m not sure about older students. And then of course the big question is, assuming they have their own blog, how much do I trust them / how much control do I exert over the blog? On the one hand, they’re seniors. On the other hand, well, they’re seniors. I’ll be interested to see what kind of resources are out there to help control and vet blogs for students.