Taking it With You

Taking it With You

Many schools are now using google apps for education to provide a collaborative space for students and teachers to create and share content.  Some districts provide their students with blog and wiki space.  I myself have created over 2,000 student identities for our Google Apps domain.  Many grad students in education, as you can see from comments of previous posts, are blogging as part of their course requirements. Dave Truss asks the question, Who Owns the Learning?

This has opened up a whole new series of questions.  What happens when our students graduate? How can we help them take their content with them?  Steve Dembo wonders how we can help them take their identities with them? We talk to students about branding, professional vs social use of networking, we encourage blogging to be an archive of their learning, then they graduate. How quickly do we delete them from our systems, how do we help them export their learning?

Dave Truss’s post suggests some way to archive a blog, something I think I shall try with mine.   We have just begun to face these questions in my district.   I need to gather possible solutions and pass them on the students.

What solutions do you provide for your students?

Update: I have been trying out BlogBooker with the export xml file from this blog.  I get the error message for a bad xml file.  I have opened it in a web browser found 2 errors and fixed those.  Still now luck and not able to find any additional errors.  I’ll give it a go tomorrow with fresh eyes.

7 thoughts on “Taking it With You

  1. I like the questions that you have asked. They are important and right now I think they are not being answered, but rather ignored because of concerns of safety and/or privacy. One way to avoid this is to provide the students themselves with exporting choices… Excellent point!
    ~Dave.

  2. I have the same issue with my student blogs that are on the Weebly platform. They will be moving up to middle school and at the moment the middle school does not use blogs. I have contacted the company directly and they hope to the ability to transfer student websites and blogs out from under an educator to the student in the future.

    It is possible to archive the website but not the blog using the Weebly system because the blogs are dependent on the Weebly database. I have found that it is possible to extract a copy of the blog using a program called deepvacuum. I will be archiving all of the student blogs onto a DVD for them at the end of the year.

  3. I did not realize that blogging was used to the extent it is in schools until reading these post.
    Being a future music teacher I was wondering if there were any wisdom as to how I would incorporate blogging into the classroom and in my case the music classroom.

  4. Weil,

    I would suggest starting small. Maybe a class blog with information about what you are currently studying, links for further information. Students could write some of the posts about what you are doing. Links to music to listen to, interviews with composers and musicians that sort of thing. Or record and upload audio/video from your classes work. You may find ideas at MusicTech.Net, or Music Education and Technology. You may already know of these links.

    Happy exploring.

  5. I am currently fighting the filter/blocked issue with my district when trying to engage my students’ learning with blogs and wiki’s. While I am a budding blogger myself, I am new to its applications in the classroom. But I am pressing ardently for it as a viable tool. Any suggestions on working around the bureaucracy?

  6. I think the tricky part is what students can share online. Many districts prohibit the use of last names on the web. This can be a struggle when trying to create naming conventions (user names and passwords) for online accounts and applications that can be viewed by the rest of the world. We want students to begin to create a digital identity, but we also need to follow district policy – often policy, tools and the functionality of naming conventions are not yet in sync.

    When dealing with filters and blocking it depends who controls you internet. There are really only 3 questions that need to asked to unblock something.
    1. Can the site be used for educational purposes? – the answer is yes for most sites
    2. Will opening the site pose a danger to the network or school data? – the answer is no for most sites
    Then there is no reason to block the site.

    If students are under 13 – then you might ask, will the use of the site require the user to create an account? If so then the site would not be appropriate for the under 13 as it would conflict with CIPA law. However many sites now have a educational site, that allow teachers to create access.

  7. I agree that proper use of technology in the professional setting is needed among students. So many students graduate and continue to be childish on the internet. I have often wondered where all the old blogs go. I created and responded to many blogs during my undergraduate courses, but many were deleted by the university once I complete the course. Where did they all go? It would be good to find an effecient way to archive old blogs. It would be useful for students to see how they were at the beginning of a lesson and compare it to how they ended it.

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