Decisions, Decisions - Technology Integrations

Among my goals for this summer was to decide which platform to use for student blogs and to explore wikis. During the school year I posted about how my attempt to begin blogging with my 6th and 7th graders did not work out because not all of my students were 13, the requirement for Blogger. Later in the spring I heard about Kid Blogs via Sara Kajder's discussion of her book. I had briefly looked at the site at the beginning of the summer, but hearing her mention it again at the Boothbay Literacy Retreat was a good reminder to look into it more seriously. I figured the best way to find out would be to sign up, so this morning I took the plunge. My initial thoughts are: I love the easy set up for classes, the privacy/safety settings with school integrations in mind, and it is free. However, they look pretty blah. When looking at the design templates, it looks like there are only two. One of the other participants at Boothbay had also mentioned her concern that students might think that a name like Kid Blogs could put a quencher on their motivation for blogging. Creativity with design is one of my favorite components of blogging, and I would hate for my students to miss out on this.

With Blogger, on the other hand, there are many positives. It is where I have always blogged, so I am very familiar with it. It would save me a lot of time because I have already figured out a lot of the tricks and stay up to date on new changes via the Blogger in Draft blog. It also has privacy settings available for free, which is what originally shifted me toward Blogger instead of Edublogs. It is also my hope that some students will want to continue their blogs after they leave our school. Even if their parents decide that they would like them to keep their blogs private initially, it would be as easy as clicking a button on the control panel and their blog could be live if they wish. Having it on Blogger would be a little bit easier to network with other bloggers that share similar interests, as compared to Kid Blogs.

The one downside that I can think of right now is that there has been an increase in spam comments on my blogs. That is the reason why I ended up switching my setting to having all comments approved by me before posting. Yet, I do not know that this is really that big of an issue because before any student makes the shift to go live, I would use it as a teachable moment to be cautious with this transition. It they prepare to make the shift when they are already leaving my classroom, then a potential scenario would be to have a parent meeting to discuss blogging safe guards with the students and parents.

I feel confident with the decision to follow through with Blogger for my 8th graders. If I decide to start blogging with my younger students at some point in the year, I am glad that I know about the Kid Blogs option.

On the wiki front, I have been grateful to get some hands on experience - the best way to learn. One of my classmates in my YA class set up a wiki for the course, and Sara Kajder set up a wiki for Boothbay. Wikis seem very easy to navigate, especially coming in with a blogging background. The one drawback that I was not previously aware of was that if a couple people want to write on the same page at the same time some people lose their input, as only one person can edit at a time. When we would be in a setting where all students would be on at the same time in any given class, this could be a nightmare. For now I am planning on focusing on getting the blogs up and running. The main reason that I wanted to explore the wikis was for on-line book club discussions. I will keep wikis in mind as I approach the first book club. However, I might decide that blogging meets our on-line discussions well enough. If Blogger had threaded comments, it would be an even easier decision for me to just go with the blogs.