I got the go-ahead from the people at work to have my 4th graders begin blogging on the b2evolution installation I made on the school district’s server. There are still some hurdles.

Most immediately, I have to get permissions from their parents. The school district has a strict policy regarding publication of student work and student identities. There is good reason for this. I respect the fact that these are other people’s children. Two things about this:

  • I already have permission forms signed for most of them from the beginning of the year. But those were general and this is a specific case.
  • The b2evolution application allows me to set each student’s work as either ‘publish’ or ‘protect.’ I plan to set it to ‘protect’ by default. That means that if an unregistered visitor tried to see that blog entry, it would not appear. But the writing will be there for all the students.

So, in a way, I wonder if I need permission to do that? To be on the safe side, and because this is going to be a demonstration project for the district, I am crossing all my t’s and dotting all the i’s. The principal was in my room today when I was talking with my students about this project. (That’s a topic for tomorrow’s update)

I copied the school district’s Permission to Publish form and rewrote it to specifically address this situation. I don’t have a copy with me or I’d include it in this post for anyone who might be curious. I can put it up tomorrow. I wonder how other blogging classes have dealt with this? I used the word ’secure’ and mentioned that I was working with the administration. But I expect that I may have difficulty with some families trusting me. It’s hard to demonstrate the safety of something that doesn’t yet exist. I can run the project without everyone participating, but that will be a shame for some of them. Maybe once I get it going for some, others will come aboard.

I should have the blogs operational by this Friday if all goes well. The district admin folks are going to be watching this carefully. Not because they are critical, or skeptical. I think they are truly curious to see if it is worthwhile. They might not realize the power of community and audience for writers. For teachers there will be the convenience of having the writing managed by the database rather than having students responsible for filing their work and then requiring the teacher to keep track of it. I think teachers are going to be all over this if it goes well.

If I begin to get other teachers interested, I plan to do an installation for each grade-level that wants to participate. I’ll either use separate databases or customize the prefix for the tables on each installation if I only have a single database to work with. The reason for this is that I can’t create separate groups of blogs that are administered by different admins within a single installation. Each installation creates it’s own community of bloggers. That’s ok. I’ll identify each grade level by their high school graduation year. That way, once they’re enrolled, their data is maintained year after year. I can then just assign different teachers to the same group of kids each year.

It might make a rather large blogring if there are 60 - 70 bloggers on a single installation. That will also mean that teachers are going to have to monitor the blogging of students that they are not necessarily working with. This is a limitation of the program for a school-wide use. At first I thought it was a deal breaker, but I’ve since decided it’s the best we can do right now. There may be other answers, but I’m not enough of an engineer to understand how to write the program that will do what I want it to.

Wordpress may come out with a multiblog application someday. They have an unofficial one called WPMU. But the installation is problematic for me. And I doubt that it has the security settings b2evo has.