I received about half the permission to publish notes back this week. All but two have the ‘Protected status’ box checked. I think I would probably check that box myself for my own kids. Not that I don’t trust them or their teachers. I think it’s a nice option for little kids. It dramatically limits the potential audience. But for a 10 year old, that may be a good thing. After all, there is going to BE an audience for their writing now, whereas previously it was only me, their parents, and an occasional friend in class.

I’m going to play with the settings and see if I can enroll a ‘guest’ user who has view-only privileges. If some of them want to let a distant relative see their web page, they can. But then I wonder whether some of the people who signed that paper might define ‘class members’ more literally than I. Still, I know the kids will enjoy getting comments from people outside the class on their blogs.

When I told them about blogging on Tuesday, it was the first time any of them had heard the word ‘blog’ and now they are very excited about becoming the first class of bloggers in our school system. They are planning titles for their blog pages. Better still, they are thinking about what they are going to write!

I visited the b2evolution skin repository and downloaded a batch of new skins. When I was configuring this installation, the skins’ site was down, so all I had to work with was the default skins that shipped with the file. They need a little fussing with to remove some of the visual distrctions and extraneous links. I don’t want the kids to get lost by clicking on a lot of irrelevant stuff. They get frustrated and so do I when I have to troubleshoot 15 problems simultaneously. So as the weeks go by the kids can learn a little bit more about the power to change the look of their blog.

Problems that I can see coming: The admin interface is going to seem like a fighter-plane cockpit to students. I used the LCD projector to show them the ‘back office’ the other day. I rolled over many of the buttons and told them that these were their special powers. I’m going to warn them not to mess with the settings. There is stuff in there that I wish they didn’t have access to. But this is an experiment. I’m curious to see what they will try to do. I also wondered today if maybe some of them will have curious parents who’ll want to get into the settings to play around. We’ll see. The biggest problem is going to be the server configuration. The admin has it set to display a 404 error for any URL that doesn’t reference a specific file. That means that when the kids write, and then click on ‘view blog,’ they will see an error page and have to add index.php to the URL. I think they can do that. But they are really not that savvy about browsing yet. Yet another learning opportunity. Too bad I only have a few more weeks with this group.

And then there are the problems that I don’t anticipate…..Those may be the most interesting and instructive.