Limited Access For New K12 Bloggers For Better Security
Oct 25th, 2007 by Scott Walker
Blogging isn’t a new phenomenon for students, but student blogging is indeed a new, and sometimes scary, phenomenon to schools. Especially those schools that aren’t used to student published webpages. A suggestion might be to set up a student’s first classroom blog to have limited access. Here is the recommendation.
A teacher can start up a new Wordpress blog, either on the school server or through sites like edublogs(recommended), and by default become the administrator. The teacher can then use this blog as the publishing ground for the students without having to dive into individual blogs for each student. To limit certain features a teacher will need to invite each student by email and set them up as a contributor. One of the key features of this model is the opportunity for the teachers to monitor all submissions(posts and comments) and decide whether it gets published to the web. A setup like this will likely make teachers and School Technology Coordinators feel more comfortable allowing students to publish to the web. Students will still be able to write their posts from anywhere with internet access, but the post will only appear when the teacher approves it. (Some Tech Coordinators may also feel more at ease if they are allowed to be on the administrator list of the blog.)
To do this,(using edublogs.org) students will need to go to edublogs.org and register. At the bottom of the registration form there is an option for just acquiring a screen name, instead of creating a blog. After they have done this, you can go to your Dashboard and under users add them via their email address. Make sure you select Contributor in the drop-down menu. They will now be able to log in to the blog using the screen name and password they created when they signed up. Setting them to contributor removes some of their privileges, but still let’s them write. You will need to approve each post. They will not be able to approve comments either, giving you full control of everything that appears on the website.
Other suggestions for teachers that are new to K12 blogging, leave them in the comments.