It is Saturday AM and I am cleaning up some ot my student blog posts from the last couple of days. I am slightly annoyed at a couple of things that I have resolved I will do differently next time around. I often say that one of the great things about teaching is that there is an annual opportunity for Deliverance - ‘called summer’ - and an annual opportunity for Redemption - called ‘next year’ - when we can revise our approach to how we run the show. It’s hard to do past a certain limit. But that’s another discussion. In the spirit of reporting research findings that are not altogether glowing, however, I need to say a few things about the “protected” option that I offered parents when I initiated the student blogs.

First of all, I put the ‘protected’ choice on my Permission to Publish form because I thought parents would be more open to the idea of having kids publishing material online if they thought there was NO chance that their kids would be exposed to random traffic from the web. I recognized the protected option as potentially limiting from the point of view of doing a full exploration of the potential of blogging with elementary school-aged kids. But I wanted to get the project going before the rest of the year got away from me. I thought programatic softward protection was redundant since I was going to personally filter all of the posts, and in retrospect the protected setting has the potential to create a lot more work for the teacher and gives kids the option to DELETE their work - something I did not want. This is no good from anyone’s point of view. I think the word “protected” sounds good to parents. It’s the word that is used on the admin panel to define that permissions setting. So I used it. But I don’t think that people really understood (I didn’t know that protection would be a problem, for instance.) what it was really for. The next time around I’m going to leave ‘protecte’ off of the permission form and only mention it individually to parents who are unwilling to sign otherwise.

Because of the way the b2evolution works, I can set the permissions for each blog to allow a person to write or edit posts with different options. The kids see a set of radio buttons that are marked ‘protected (members only)’, ‘private (you only)’, and ‘draft (not published)’. I denied them the ‘published (public),’ button. For those students who have permission for ME to publish their work, all works according to my plan. I proof their post, as I need to do with any student work, and then hit the save - publish button. The work is then published for all to view. And it is beyond their reach to re-edit because I reserved that permission for me alone. But the kids whose work is merely saved, and can be read by members only, have the option to edit or DELETE their posts. For the one kid who did not have permission to participate in the project at all (ie. did not return any paperwork), I had him writing with ‘private’ status.

Here’s what happened today: One little girl who has written a lot on her blog appears to have dumped all of her writing. It doesn’t exist anymore. I won’t know until Monday why this happened. It wasn’t until the other day when I was working with one of the kids that I noticed this was a choice they were given, but I didn’t say anything about it since it didn’t seem like it would be a problem. After all, they have work stored in the file server, and it sits there forever.

Another situation that is a pain - for me- is that the kid who didn’t turn in his permission form has been writing with ‘private’ status. I haven’t seen any of his work. He showed up with his permission form on Friday. So now I have to log in with his ID and go back and re-save all of his work to ‘protected’ status so that I can then work as an admin and ‘publish’ all of it. This is going to take me a while.

Here’s the lesson I learned: Don’t use ‘protected’ status as the final “published” form for a post because it is not secure from vandalism by the AUTHOR. Don’t let the kids publish with the ‘draft’ or ‘private’ settings because those posts are not viewable by the teacher. What’s the point of that in a school setting???

My plan from here: go back and changed everyone’s permissions so that they are all ‘protected’ only. Warn the kids not to delete anything because it will hurt their writing grade. Next year, have a meeting with parents where I can tell and SHOW them what this is about - and do not give them the ‘protected’ option as a default choice.