Well, challenge 2 for the 30 Days to Get Your Students Blogging Teacher Blogging Challenge involves sharing information about blogging guidelines that we use with students. Although I do share guidelines verbally in class with students, I realized that I have not actually put them in writing! Since my students will be participating in the Student Blogging Challenge next month, I decided it was time to fix this oversight.
I popped over the beginner challenge information and looked at guidelines on several of the class and student blog sites shared for inspiration. I then developed my list of guidelines which are very similar to the verbal instructions I give in class. You can review the guidelines at our class web site.
I was also inspired by this parent guide from the 2KM blog. I really liked the look and feel of it, so I created a similar guide for the parents of my students. Instead of making it available via print, I put a link to the pdf file on a new page entitled “Parent Info” and also included images of the guide. You can see the images below.
To draw attention to these two new pages, I added a couple of posts to the class web site so parents and students could see them easily next time they visit our class site. Additionally, I will talk about the new pages, and especially the guidelines, next time we are in the computer lab this week.
So what do you think? Will my students be prepared to join in the challenge? We are almost all signed up, and I think they are getting excited.
You have certainly been doing your homework for this challenge. What an impressive result. Your page of guidelines is an excellent resource and your pdf file for parent use, is really well displayed. Did all this take very long to do? Thank you for completing this challenge.
Thanks, Anne.
The guidelines did not take long at all for me to put together, especially since we had discussed most of it verbally in class over the year. I just finally put it in writing. The parent guide took a couple of hours, but I spent at least 30 minutes looking for a new font online. Plus I played a lot with the look of the images and such. We have Hypersnap on our school computers, so it makes it really easy to make screenshots and add information to them.
Nice work Janelle. And I mean both your post and effort for parents and students.
I haven’t got a class but since I decided to join this challenge I opted to post on my rules and the process I’d go through to set up class blog rules. Rules are rules.
I think your students are lucky to have you and will be prepared for the challenge. Those who aren’t will certainly be guided by you. So (as we say it down under), no worries, mate.
cheers,
Malyn
Thanks, Malyn. I love that you are working with teachers at your school to help them feel more comfortable with blogging.
Janelle, this is great inspiration for me on how to present guidelines for accessing blogs to parents. I have never given much thought to presenting it so systematically. I have always just sent the link to them. Now I am inspired to do more. Thanks, Denise
Thanks, Denise. I definitely got the inspiration from the blog I linked above. I really like the visual representation of everything. Good luck with yours!