Creating your Classroom Blogs Part 2 Personalize and Audience

Here goes the second attempt at this post.  Deleted it yesterday by mistake:(

Kids crave audience.  To have a good classroom blog where kids want to work you need to build an audience so they preform.  There are many great audience builders.  

cc licensed flickr photo shared by batmoo

Clustr Maps

I have been using this service since I started blogging.  It is simple and effective.  What you receive from clustr maps is a small icon that sits on your blogs sidebar.  In the design part of your blogspot blog you can choose "add a gadget".  Here you scroll down till you find .  You will be posting code in from the clustr map site.  Go to clustr maps and fill in the form.  Following this you will get a box where the html code is for your blog.  Copy that code into your clipboard and then paste it into the "add gadgets" box open at your blog.  You now have a map in your sidebar that will show where people from around the world have been visiting from.  The beauty about clustr maps is that the map just receives dots.  A dot for every visit.  You will see after a while that many dots will show up from around the world.  Some are legitimate hits but many are just google inquiries.  The kids do not need to know this ;) Audience is audience.  Soon real visitors will come and leave comments behind.  When students have audience they will out preform previous standards of work.

Chat Boxes

I see some of you starting to shake in your shoes.  Chat boxes are an integral part of any class blog.  This can be one of your greatest teaching tools.  Kids use the boxes to help each other out.  They ask questions, answer other students questions and...... all when they are not in school.  The blog and chatbox or help box do not sleep.  This makes your classroom alive 24 hours a day.  Kids need to have some ground rules though.  Make sure that they are aware that the blog and chat box are extensions of school and appropriate behaviour is expected.  In my many years blogging and using chat boxes very few "bad" things have gone on.  The worst is juvenile boys being boys and some potty jokes.  Simply using this a teachable moment and reexplaining the rules of the blog brings everyone back in line.  If for some reason it doesn't work I could remove the chat box for a week and show them why they need it when it is no longer there for them.  Students do not view it as an MSN zone but as an extension of the the classroom because of the audience you have shown them. 

At the beginning of the year I monitor the chat room.  Answering questions and overseeing its use.  In recent years an amazing thing has taken place.  In about October students start monitoring the room.  They by choice make having the math blog open during their evening computer sessions.  It becomes one tab on their browser and believe it or not they become the teachers.  Students teaching students.... does it get any better than that.  

I have used many chat boxes but am currently using cbox.  It is easy to set up.  One thing I will recommend is to turn off the ability to add URLs.  Spammers love to drop URLs into your chatboxes.  This option negates the potentially bad links sent by spammers.  I wanted to reuse a cbox this year but the spammers had gotten to it and continued to add bad comments.  I simply created a new cbox and started over again. Simple process.  Once again just use the "add gadget" from your blogger design template and paste the html into the space provided.  

Chat boxes can change the way your blog works.  I highly recommend them.

What about the Parents?

Part of the blog needs to be for parents.  It is a spot where you can direct them to go read when they are interested in WHY kids need to learn 21st C literacy.  I found many links from John Evan's in his Diigo account. I chose 3 links for parents and here they are:

• THIS is a 21st Century Skill by Dean Shareski
• 21st-Century Skills: Evidence, Relevance, and Effectiveness by Scott Aronowitz
• Create, Collaborate, Communicate: Empowering Students With 21st Century Skills by Chris Riedel
• US to back 21st century learning By Maggie Shiels

Parents have never asked me Why we blog but I am ready with answers if they do.  This brings to a close Day 2 of Setting up your Classroom Blog or Blogs.  Tomorrow we will deal with first posts for you and the students and more about building Audience.

Setting up Classroom Blogs Lesson 1

This will be a series of posts designed to help teachers set up classroom blogs using blogger.com.  It is currently the middle of the summer break.  Time to stop totally thinking about relaxation and slowly start the process of getting ready for another school year.  It is at this time that I start putting the class blogs together for the next year. It is a simple process that takes a bit of time.  So I break it up over a few days.  I need to get back into the saddle slowly not all at once:)

Today I cleaned up my blogger dashboard.  For those of you that have blogs already you know what I am talking about.  I have over 30 of them so I need to clean up my dashboard.  This means that all old blogs get "hidden". 

When you click the hide button only the blogs you want on your dashboard will be visible.  All others will be available to you if you click on view all at the bottom of your dashboard.

Now that my dashboard is clean I choose

Here I now go into the process of making the 4 classroom blogs for the year.  It is a simple process.  Follow the instructions provided by blogger and there should be no problems.  I will give a few suggestions however for those of you that are new to this:)

1. Blog Title.  Keep this simple.  I just call mine 817 Math (2010) This is just a room number and a year.  The title for the student zones does not need to be fancy (but it can be if you like)
2. Blog Address.  It took a while for me to figure out a few tricks here.  I always changed the names of my addresses and forgot what they were called.  Now I use a simple url and change the last 2 digits to show the year.  spmath81710.  spmath817 is the room and 10 is the calender year. Next year it would be spmath81711 and so on.  It is a nice way to organize your blogs.

You now have a blog.  I always publish something as a first post.  Today it was titled Test in the body of the blog I simply typed TEST and labeled the post "first post".  This is so I can see what is going on when I preview the blog.

The new blogger offers new templates for beginners.  This is a nice touch.  I chose a template from the start menu but in the near future will change that design.  But for today the generic template will do. 

Next steps.

You need to go back to your dashboard and click settings

You are going to change a few things in the settings to suit your needs.  The first thing I change is under settings/basic I add a description.  This description is part of your heading at the blog.  Once again I keep this simple.

You then have to save.  Moving over2 tabs in the settings brings you to formatting.  Here you need to change the time to where you live.  This will provide you with an accurate timestamp on when people comment and post to the blog.  Handy when tracking student work. Be sure to save these settings.

Finally move on to commenting.  Here you have some choices.  I chose to allow all people to comment.  This is a bit risky for first time bloggers but in all the years I have been doing this there has been very little spam on current blogs.  If the spam becomes an issue I will add comment moderation.

My settings on the blogs are 

and until something happens I leave the comments wide open. You have many options from only allowing group members to comment to people with google accounts.  The problem with limiting comments is that you shut out audience.  Kids want to get comments from abroad.  If you allow comments from anyone you will be able to receive information for other students.  A way around this is to enable comment moderation.  I only use this on old blogs to prevent spammers.  But you could moderate comments to the blog. 

To moderate comments choose "always" and add your email address.  Now you get notified and get to read all comments before the arrive at the blog.

Click save setting on the bottom and voila you have set up your blog.  Now for the hard part but.......

that is a different post for a different day.