Oct 22 2006
Safe Blogging
When blogging with students, my #1 priority is keeping them safe from outside influences. Recently on my edu and learnerblog sites there has been a rash of vulgar, inappropriate comments left on both my and my students blogs.
One way that I attempt to keep my students safe is that I used my email address when creating blogs for each of my students. During some recent updates over at edu/learnerblogs, that is no longer possible. That, along with the increase in spam, caused me to move my blogs here to Wordpress.com.
I looked at a variety of other blogs, but decided on wordpress.com because learnerblogs uses wordpress for their blogs and everything would be similar. Unfortunately, wordpress also limits your email address to one use. You can add blogs to your email address, but then all those blogs have access to all the other other blogs linked to that email. That doesn’t work for me – I can’t have students with access to MY blogs nor the other students’ blogs. What I have decided to do is to keep the student blogs at learnerblogs for now. I will have each student add me to their blog as an Editor. That will allow me to log onto their blogs with my username and password. Also, those blogs are still linked to my email so I will be notified of all comments posted.
Next year when I need to create new blogs for my new students I will have to send a letter home asking parents to create an email for their children to use solely as their blog email. It would be great to have all the emails at yahoo or gmail, too. I will get the passwords to each email so that I can monitor the comments that way. I will have each student add me to their blog as an Editor and I think I can also subscribe to the comments to keep tabs on them that way. I will test this procedure with some dummy accounts first.
I hate change…..but if I have to make changes I’m going to make sure that I have it all planned out before I start 
