Safe Blogs Used Successfully in Schools!

When sixth-grade teacher Rachel Yurk created a blog for her classroom this year, she began the online learning experiment with a simple, engaging question: "What's your favorite book and why?"
By that night, Yurk's e-mail had exploded with about 200 messages - each one notifying her that another comment had been posted to the online discussion.
Safely nested in Virtual Office, a secure system, Yurk's classroom blog engages students in a common discussion tool without exposing them to uncensored activity in the real-world blogosphere.
"Blogs, or online discussions have struggled to gain acceptance in mainstream K-12 education." said David Warlick, a North Carolina public speaker and author who's working on the second edition of "Classroom Blogging: A Teacher's Guide to the Blogosphere."
But new educational software, such as Virtual Office or Moodle protects students by letting them "publish" their writing within a secure server where teachers can monitor the comments.
Student Kristin Hesselbach, 11, said she finds the blogs "more helpful" than talking in class because "you can hear more than one person's opinion on a question or conversation.
What teachers are saying:

• "It's a nice chance for everyone to see what kids do when they have the ability to become published."
  
• "The idea of students being accountable for what they write, and for that information to be instantaneously published, is more of what the real world is doing today."


• "The students are more willing to talk about things, and they can type so fast!"


• "Communication via our computers is the way of the world now. Students know that and respond to it."

Cory Peppler, an English teacher at New Berlin's Eisenhower High School, maintains a class site for the juniors in his advanced placement language class. You have to remember, K-12 education is aways slower to incorporate these new technologies than the business world.

original article by: ERIN RICHARDS edited by: Peggy Cortez