As far as the blog,I agree with you but we had an incident at the school with inappropriate student email. It wasn’t any of my kids.

I want to moderate the comments so that I can keep kids outside the class from being disrespectful.My students want this too. We discussed it. They feel safe because I can protect them from negative comments. I will be inviting my kids to be contributers and even authors, but not yet.

I stumbled across your blog from Leading From the Heart, and felt obliged to comment here. While I haven’t taught in public schools I have led students as part of my recently completed MA degree, where I used blogs to communicate with students and facilitate interclassroom discussions.

I think that talking to students *before* the blog goes live is important. In that talk, you do more than just lay down your rules (though you almost certainly will have to, simply because of school policies) – you also ask for their input, and as a class develop the guidelines. As soon as they recognize themselves as both the authors and addressees of the rules surrounding the blog they will both be more likely to adhere to those rules and, having legitimized the rules (hopefully consented to possible punishments that follow from breaking rules) I would expect they would be more ‘willing’ to accept the consequences for violating rules.

I found that disconnecting the blog from the classroom is where a variety of problems crop up. I let students post without my moderating comments, and if I detected a problem in how things were working I noted that there would be a discussion of appropriate use in the next class. In the following class, I would always devote a few minutes to talk about what had been going on on the blog and the cool things that were going on (which happened most of the time), or why what was going on wasn’t appropriate for an educational environment (which happened only rarely).

I recognize that I deal with ‘mature’ students but hope that this was helpful nevertheless.

Arlan,
Thanks for sharing your experience with classroom blogs. I’m hoping to eliminate some problems by reading the comments before someone posts them. Thankfully, that is an option in edublogs.

Mabuhay! I’m a Biology teacher from the Philippines and used my blog for my class too. I post some of my lessons,school events, grades,assignments etc. I have a chat-box before where visitors can comment. The irony of it since it is open to public, I experienced nasty words from unknown students shouting their dislikes from a certain teacher and their classmates and later saying nasty things about me. I had to remove right away that chat-box. Of course they will not admit it because anybody can used pseudonyms or even the name of their classmate to blaim. But nevertheless,classroom blog can help in the delivery of the lesson. By the way, I like your entry regarding classroom management. More power.