First+Steps

= = =First Steps=

It's imperative that teachers understand the nature of blogging before introducing it to students. Not only will it keep you a few steps ahead of your class, but it could be the deciding factor between a successful or unsuccessful blogging project. Being a blogger and supervising students blogging are different perspectives, so it's highly recommended that you establish your own blog to become comfortable with it and understand the nuances of the blogosphere first.

Before you go too far down the blogging path ... be transparent in your process and let parents know about the wonderful opportunities students will have and how you are addressing concerns with cybersafety and having a global audience. Be proactive! Have a plan. Help make sure this is the positive experience it can be.


 * Here are a few questions that you will need to consider:**
 * 1) How will Internet safety issues be addressed?
 * What are the guidelines about sharing personal information? (first name, last name, school name, location, location/time of extra-curricular activities, other people's personal information)
 * Who has access to the student blogs?
 * Who can comment on them?
 * Will student images be allowed on the class blog or students' blogs?
 * 1) What if some students don't have Internet access at home?

Click the link below to download a sample letter you can use as a guideline for developing your own. You will need to tailor it for your class' needs.



Once you bring blogging into your classroom, the best place to start is a class blog. A class blog is a great way to share information about what your class has been up to with students, parents and other classes. It can used to post information you'd like the class to be reflective about and/or begin discussing asynchronously. You can also post examples of student work or images from classroom activities. Later, you can also add students as authors so they can create posts as well. **Make sure you have consent from parents to post work or student images and that you have established clear guidelines with students about posting personal images, identifying students in images, protecting personal information and commenting etiquette.**

A great video to help upper intermediate, secondary students and teachers understand the nature of the Internet and why protecting your online identity is important, check out the commoncraft video on **Protecting Reputations Online //in Plain English//.**

Need More Help?
Sue Waters, also known as to the Edublogger, has written a series of posts on her Edublogs support site to help teachers understand the steps involved with setting up your class blog. She is a wealth of information and offers excellent support for Edublogs users. If you're ready to set up your own class blog, this is one of the best places to start.

Step 1: Create a Class Blog

Step 2: Set Up Your Blogging Rules & Guidelines

The global audience is a significant motivator to students and being able to "see" the country origins of visitors helps them understand how widespread readership is and why protecting personal information is so important. So that being said, here is a link to Step 6: Add a Visitor Tracking Widget to Your Blog Sidebar. Sue Waters introduces this later, but the sooner this is added to a blog the more "real" the audience becomes.

After this, you're ready to move on to the important step of teaching students about the power of commenting.

//image: This is going to HURT by TOMTEC released under a CC Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license//