Expanding My Knowledge About Edublogs…

On Friday I had five students hand in their parent permission forms to take part in our classroom blog!  I am hoping that more students will have hand in their forms tomorrow at school.  Today students did not have class as it was a Professional Development Day in our school division.  I am hoping to be able to start blogging with my students next week! (Crossing my fingers!)

Today on Twitter I saw that Alec retweeted a tweet that Sue Waters posted in regards to Edublog student blogging series.  It is a fantastic resource and I know it will come in handy as I continue to work on my classroom blog using Edublog.  The Edublog student blogging series is a step by step guide to help setting up a classroom blog. The link is:  http://teacherchallenge.edublogs.org/blogging-with-students/

Today I completed Step One!

Step One:

• I watched a video that gave a overview of what a blog is.
• I found the following link helpful because it allowed me to become more familiar with the blogging vocabulary and the different roles a user can be assigned to.  I am going to have my students be a contributor.  I like that they can write their own posts as a contributor, but can not publish them until my approval.  That way if a student submitted a post before I got to look at it I would still be able to review the post before others had access to reading it online. http://edublogs.org/curriculum-corner-setting-up/#anatomy
• I spent a lot of time exploring examples of real class blogs.  It was nice to see the different age group of blogs and see how other teachers set up their blogs.  I know I will use a lot of their blogs as a guide until I before more comfortable with class blogging.
• I am going to have my students draw a self portrait and use their self portraits as their Avatar. 🙂
• I changed the time zone under the general settings in my Edublog account settings.
• I am still playing around trying to decide what type of theme I would like to use for my classroom blog and what I would like it to look like.
• Tomorrow before or after class I am going to work on Step Two! I am really excited for class tomorrow night and getting the opportunity to learn from Sue Waters.  I know tomorrow’s class is going to help me out a lot in my Digital Project journey exploring Classroom Blogs!