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Up(dated)
By audhill | January 5, 2008
I’m updating by blog after a hiatus. (thank you Damien for the prod; I needed it)
I haven’t been updating of late because all I do is work blogging with my students. I spend a lot of my nights getting their blog entries up. The deal with my tech director for unblocking typepad was that I monitor everything… all the time… and that nothing go up until I’ve read it. I also used to have a password to get onto the blog, but I removed that because the need to log in and relog in twice for each blog made it impossibly unwieldly. I decided that monitoring was enough control for protection of and from students (neither abuse from without or within… that’s the motto) So… I’m monitoring each and every entry and each and every comment. Nothing can get by me.
I’ve learned a lot doing this. This is our current structure and rationale.
5 or 6 kids to a blog. This compartmentalizes the blogs a little bit more and creates a team spirit. I have 20 blogs to look at instead of 110.
Weekly posts. Entries are due every Thursday night/Friday morning (before lunch). I tried having the members each pick a day so that we updated daily, but it became too confusing for them. Now we have a weekly entry of every member of the team. I tried making the due date Friday, but that usually meant Sunday night to my students.. so now it’s due Friday and I get them all up no later than Sunday.
Minimum Standards. The minimum blog entry is 300+ words. Spell checked (10 pts off per unspellchecked word). paragraphed and self edited. The purpose of a minimum word count is to get real essays not “hey folks” entries. I require spell checking and take off 10 points per word because spell checking is an absolute minimum level of care for work (no points off for homonyms or wrong words), paragraphing because they never do and self edit, because spell check is never enough.
Choice. Students choose 3 out of 4 topics per month. One topic per month is chosen by me and is evaluated by a stronger criteria. I put a basic rubric right into comments, but no grades go on there.
Celebration. I help them to celebrate each other and strive for excellence with something I call the Weekly Wow Awards. But I’m going to rename it The (not so) Weekly (but very) WOW AWARDS because I can’t get one done every week. I just can’t.
Next entry… what blogging is doing for my students…