t-shirthumor.com
When you blog, you share ideas, thoughts, opinions and images with everybody in the blogosphere. In order to keep your posts on a safe ground, there are some issues to consider, especially if you have a class blog.
There are several things you can do to protect your students and yourself.
How would you blog safely with your students?
Waiting to share ideas on the topic.
The Blogging Team
14 comments:
The Blogging Team asserts,
There are several things you can do to protect your students and yourself.
The team asks,
How would you blog safely with your students?
A gut reaction is, "How safely do you blog, yourselves?"
Let me tell a non-story, then offer a couple suggestions.
A Non-Story
I regret that I have yet to confirm explicit permission from an associate to share the story that I wanted to share here, in this particular venue. I hold a generic, signed consent agreement; but I'm still seeking informed consent for publication in such an international venue. I've elicited explicit permission on-list (in another of Yahoo!(R) Groups), where the issue emerged, and will try again though personal correspondence. In a nutshell, the story involves pictures of students in secondary school.
Suggestions
1. Though I hate to throw what may feel like a wet blanket on many of your blogging or other online endeavours; like the educator in the non-story above, I would hesitate to publish anything online for which I have not ascertained the ABC's in writing: a) the assent of any minors involved, b) the consent of their guardians or parents, and c) consensus with peer educators.
2. If you've recently launched a blogger.com blog, please go to your Dashboard to Manage: Settings, and Turn Word Verification On.
Cheers, Paul
I'm sorry that the comment above opens as "anonymous said...." I thought it would get prefaced with my Blogger display name (pab).
I definitely wrote that comment, and that lead-in helps me sound mean and nasty, when I really don't want to. I am a bit screen-burnt, but still smiling.
Cheers, Paul
pab's potpourri
I'm not so experienced in blogging as the previous speakers and can give just a point of view of a reasonable person.
I think you'd better not publish somebody's ideas, pictures, music, etc. If you want to share something you've found in the Internet you can add a link to an interesting "thing".
From a teacher's point of view I will never publish any kind of students' assessment and won't suggest "too hot" topics for discussion (race, religion, sex orientaion, etc)
Hi. I am almost a new blogger. I'd like to know common practice in this area: word verification?,etc, spam control. Common sense is helpful, I guess.
In my classes, adult learners, I master the blog, and I have contributors, one in each group. The others only respond to comments, they cannot write posts.
As regards safety, I think the first question to ask ourselves is how old our students are. If we are working with adults, by simply moderating the comments and entries it will be enough, I guess. Just to see no irresponsible or rude contributions are published in our blogs. But when we work with students under 18, I think it is better to inform their parents of what we will be doing and to ask for their written consent to publish their children's contributions, as well as, to have a moderated blog. And moderating the blog also helps to fight spam and other unwanted messages.
I also find juanlusz's idea useful: limiting the number of contributors, especially in bigger groups, can be a solution. Maybe, dividing a class in groups and having one contributor per group. I guess we have to analyse the needs of each group as well.
Regards
Pat
I haven't work with my students online yet, and really don't have an idea. Though, I am completely agree with Lena Vyushkina.
I'd better listen to what peers will say on this problem.
Yours,
Nina Lyulkun
How would you blog safely with your students?
Just like anything else, what it means to "blog safely" depends on the context, which means that any number of factors can influence the way a class goes about blogging. Like Nina, I have not blogged with students yet, but I have learned through this course that many of the blog hosts offer a variety of privacy settings to choose from. However, as we've seen many times in this course and in other online communities of practice, the act of sharing work with others can be really motivating and rewarding, so if it is possible to safely create such an environment, then I would like to try!
Mary H
When I've attended presentations on blogging, security and privacy have always been questions that I ask about. The only answer I've received, however,is that it hasn't been a concern in that person's experience. This is not a very satisfactory answer.
Even if we are teaching adults as I am, I still have a concern about legal responsibility. Clearly, there needs to be something on the blog to indicate that users will not hold you, or your institution responsible if some "nut" contacts them.
How can we keep a blog private for a group such as a class? If there is a way, that still doesn't help if the "nut" is in the class!
I hoping that someone out there with more experience in blogging can help me to find answers to these questions.
Veronica Baig
I agree with Pat Maceda and Elizabeth HS.
I think that one should bear in mind our students' age, remind them and outselves that if we are to include resources from another page we should create a link to it.
Last but not least, when blogging with adults we should advice them not to include personal information.
It would be really interesting to hear of ways to keep class blogs entirely private (Veronica's question, above), because that sounds terribly important if the bloggers are children.
Though I cannot put my fingers on any examples at the moment, I gather that institutions with sufficient resources can set up independent blog servers (maybe using elgg or wordpress).
For adults, David recommends advising them not to include personal information. I suppose that goes for bloggers' profiles as well as the entries that they may in public venues.
That sounds similar to recommendations that colleagues who have university students blogging already make. There's another recommendation that they may make - a relatively passive measure for ensuring privacy.
This is to have students unlist their Blogger blogs, as Blogger explains:
Add your Blog to our listings?
A Public blog appears in your Blogger Profile. If you select "No" we will not show your blog anywhere on Blogger.com, but it will still be available on the Internet. (Dashboard: Settings: Basic)
Then only people who know the unlisted blog address can find it easily.
An unlisted setting, when combined with word verification in Blogger may help secure blogs that learners write with classmates.
Dear all,
More experienced bloggers or not, you've touched in many essential issues to blog safely with your students. I didn't want to write anything before because the purpose was to get you thinking about the possibilities.
And you all have a point!
Let's say you're just beginning to blog. The first thing you'll be doing is setting your blog. Decision number one: is it a class blog? Is everybody going to be interacting on the same blog or will each student host his own blog? If it's your first experience, then I'd suggest start small with one single blog. If you decide for each student having his own blog, then make sure to keep track of them (through RSS!)
OK. So, time to work on the blogging settings. Paul and others have given wonderful suggestions.
- Protection against spammers: include word verification(Settings - Comments - Show word Verification)
- You can define who can comment. Remember that if you restrict only to members, then you may be restricting the participation of a broader audience, though.
- Add your email to receive notifications when someone leaves a comment on your blog.
- Keep your blog unlisted (Settings - Basic - Add your blog to our listings? (NO))
- In Permissions, you can add people as guests (they can only post and edit the posts they authored) or you can have contributors (with administrative status who have access to all the blog features). Use these options carefully.
These are just some issues related to the blog settings. However, there's more to blogging safely than that...Nowadays, students must have other kinds of literacy, including media literacy. Even if you are teaching languages, teaching about safety and privacy issues is part of the job. Don't let students give their emails, MSN, Skype IDs, no phone numbers or addresses. They should be selective on the kind of personal information they will be sharing. Make sure to mention the dangers of online predators as a preventive measure.
Don't forget parents. They need to give written permission for the blogging activity and the online photos.
Students love to see themselves online. I wouldn't say that you can't publish their photos,but parents must know and approve what is being done. If they don't want it, students can always draw or take photos to represent their avatar.
Last but not least is copyright issues. Get informed, don't use copyrighted materials. Ask for permission. Be sure to give credits.
For more on copyright, check our
Week 3 Wiki Page.
Well, just wrapping up everything you had already mentioned. Did I forget anything? Certainly! The list is certainly never-ending as Web-tools develop and people interact! My advice? Be sensible and blog safely!
Any more ideas?
Beijos,
Carla
I have just read the whole safety discussion and really appreciate this help, since safety is paramount in my case.
However, I got another idea while checking out the safety features in my blog. It says under "enable post pages" that each post has its own unique web page, in addition to appearing on my blog's front page.
So, would it be useful to set up a CALL lesson and put all the instructions, links, homework etc. on a post page, then send the students to that web page at the start of the lesson? Or is this a kind of Rube Goldberg solution, for which there is a simpler way?
Sincerely,
Mary S. in Hungary
Very useful ideas!!!
I used to moderate comments as much as possible and I also informed parents about the purpose of working with blogs and the precautions I was taking but now I feel that I have many more things to do.
Silvana
Rather late, I've found a link on an article by Aaron Campbell I wanted to share with you all on this issue:
In Blogging, the Benefits of Exposure Are Worth the Risk, in which he discusses how he dealt with this issue when blogging with a class of young adults in Japan...
Now, when working with students who are not of age, I've recently heard some teachers asking: should we be blogging with them at all? Perhaps a discussion forum where they can share files is all that is needed when you're not looking for an audience beyond your class? I would suggest a blog where posts AND comments can be moderated by the teacher(s) (such as Class Blogmeister)as a starting point, and a blog which only invited people can have access to as a transition to authentic blogging.
My 2 cents,
Gladys
Post a Comment