Borderland

All this school year I’ve made little paper journals each week for the 4th graders to write in. They are just six half-sheets of xerox paper stapled together. At first I made them out of scrap paper that came from a box of miscopies kept near the copy machine. The kids wrote on the plain side and occasionally got a little entertainment out of the random nonsense on the printed sides of the pages. But the scrap supply is unreliable. I mostly make the journals out of new sheets of plain paper, cut in half. I use this format for informal writing mainly because it can go home each week and I don’t have to worry about whether a notebook comes back on Monday. The spiral notebooks are also a pain to lug home to read over the weekend. I spend about a half hour each week going through them. The kids spend about 15 minutes a day writing in them, and the parents who care to read what the young folks have to say can see what’s on the minds of their kids.

The writing in these little journals is mostly unremarkable. A few students have improved quite a bit, and have developed a recognizable voice. All of them have learned to write on a single topic rather than creating disconnected sets of random statements. For the most part, spelling and handwriting is rough, but I do what I can to encourage and support those who want to work on that.

These little books are so primitive! Exercises, mainly. But instructive. I learn that most kids spend a lot of time out and about in the evening. Many play electronic games and watch videos for hours each week. Writing is a chore. This, I believe, is the case for most people. I think that if the students were writing for a real audience (each other, members of their community, and other interested people) maybe they would begin to develop a more personal voice in their writing.

Classroom blogging: I got charged up about school weblogs a few months ago, and I’ve been looking for a suitable platform to use. That is about to change.

I spent Sunday getting familiar with b2evolution. I’m going online with it in the next week or so. I’ve got several templates edited so that a lot of the “cool” (read unnecessary) features are either stripped or commented out. This is by far the best multiblogging application I’ve seen for elementary kids. Each installation displays four blogs initially. There is an aggregator blog, a linkblog, and two normal blogs that are created as starter examples. The system is documented in these blogs. They all display posts on the “All Blog”, which aggregates the posts of the individual blogs if it’s enabled in the settings panel. Any other blogs that are subsequently created for the installation can be listed on the blogrolls of the members’ blogs. Each installation thereby creates a distinct community. The linkblog allows members to post to sites outside of the group. There are dozens of templates for different skins. Users are assigned levels. The best part – and the reason I want to use this with elementary kids – the blog admin can view, edit, and comment on all of the posts before they are viewable to unregistered users. And…that can happen in the aggregator blog so that the teacher doesn’t have to search through all of the blogs to see who has written something. I know that rss feeds can do the same thing, but with this setup I can edit, and comment right from the aggregator. Students can also see the unapproved posts of their classmates, but those posts are protected from public view until the admin clicks on the publish button.

Visions of grandeur: I was wondering what I would do if this thing takes off. The default installation only recognizes one database. If I kept enrolling members then the All Blog would become uselessly huge. I looked all over the place for the script that creates the database tables to see if I could edit the table prefixes. I couldn’t find the spot where the variables were defined. After a bunch of poking around I gave up and searched the b2evolution forums and got the answer to my question on the second try. That part of the script says:

// ** DB table names **

/**#@+
 * database tables' names
 *
 * (change them if you want to have multiple b2's
      in a single database)
 */
$tableposts      = 'evo_posts';
$tableusers      = 'evo_users';
$tablesettings   = 'evo_settings';
$tablecategories = 'evo_categories';
$tablecomments   = 'evo_comments';
$tableblogs      = 'evo_blogs';
$tablepostcats   = 'evo_postcats';
$tablehitlog     = 'evo_hitlog';
$tableantispam   = 'evo_antispam';
$tablegroups     = 'evo_groups';
$tableblogusers  = 'evo_blogusers';
$tablelocales    = 'evo_locales';
/**#@-*/

Boom! I change the table prefixes to something descriptive, instead of evo, and every teacher who wants one can have their own class blogsite. More to come. Let the revolution begin.