My summer school students have entered the blogosphere. I finally set aside my apprehension and posted an “assignment” on my classroom blog, asking them to respond to a couple of traditional questions about Of Mice and Men. It is nothing too technological; just using new technology to do something old. But, it’s a start.

That is one thing that resonated with me while reading Richardson’s book: a suggestion to “start small” (I think I read it there…). I suppose that is what I’m doing, and I should give myself some credit for that.

I have so many questions still; many of them related to the technical aspects of blogging: how do trackbacks work? how do I use technorati tags? how do I do a better job of linking students to one another (blogroll? bloglines? RSS feeds?)?

I set up Sage in my Firefox browser, loaded a few feeds into it, and I like the possibilities I see so far.

Setting up each of the students on Learnerblogs.org was a little clunky. Most of it had nothing to do with the website itself; thank you to those who are offering the space and maintaining it! We educators love free stuff! But we had issues here with email addresses, computer issues, etc. Eventually, though, they all ended up with a blog of their own.

One thing I need to do in the future is decide on some policy issues, i.e. responsible use. And how do you balance the need to protect kids and make parents happy, and allow for true conversation and expression to take place. I need to do some more reading before the school year starts in September.

I also need to explore the possibilities of housing our student blogs on our own server. Our tech guy found some pretty clear instructions for using WordPress (which I am so far impressed with) on our own server. Now we just need more server space….

Ah, so much more to say.