Challenges to Integrating Technology

I have been so excited to finally be able to integrate more technology in my classroom. All year long I have wanted to get my students blogging. Even though I was originally planning to have my students use Edublogs, I decided to use Blogger when I realized that Edublogs does not allow for flexibility in some of the privacy settings that Blogger has. The parents I checked in with were more comfortable having the blogs internal (only open to other school staff and students, as well as parents). The other advantage of Blogger was that the more I learn about Google Docs, the more excited I was for student applications.

I tried to be very thoughtful and thorough to make sure and take steps for my students to be safe and protected while learning to use more technology. Before creating accounts, I had a parent meeting to gain parent consent, and then I mailed home letters and consent forms for any parents who were unable to attend the meeting. Next, I drafted an agreement to discuss with students for them to sign.

Then came the big moment... I walked students through the process of signing up for their Gmail accounts. Everything was great until my excitement was squelched with realization that many of my 7th graders are not quite 13 yet. Some are just a couple of weeks away, while others won't have their birthdays until the summer. None of my 6th graders would be ready yet.

After school I did some searching and realized that there is Google Apps for education. I am excited that they will be able to have access in a safe secure environment for everything, except Blogger. I will get right on this tomorrow, but I have to talk to our tech about some of the settings first. Now I am reconsidering blogs. Some thoughts right now are: Will I have to wait on blogs until students turn 13? If so, will I allow some to get started as 7th graders or wait for the 8th grade year when all students would be able to start blogging together?

The other glitch is that Ning also has a 13 year old requirement. I had just started a new Ning that I had closed to the public that I was going to use for book club discussions. I had previously looked to see if they had an age requirement and thought they did not, but today after the Google Accounts road block I checked again and found that they do have a similar policy. It appears that they all stem from COPPA.

While this has been extra stress added on to an already busy and draining week, I will persevere in seeing what will work for my school. My current plan is as follows:

*Set up the education Google Apps as soon as possible
*Continue using my Edublog classroom blog for discussions, even though it does not have threaded comments for free, which would have facilitated classroom discussions much better, rather than a Ning
*Continue investigating opportunities for my students to blog in a closed environment for free, whether it is this year or next year when the students are thirteen.
*Think about how I can still use technology to increase the sense of "real" audiences for my students with whichever tools end up being available. Even if students are not able to have their own blogs, I will focus on how I can maximize the benefits of Google Docs.