I am gearing up to introduce blogging to my Grade 6-9 students.  I have attended two ETMOOC sessions with Sue Waters, have read some of Sue’s blogs about blogging with students, have scheduled in time to attend another archived ETMOOC on the same topic this week.

Now that I have a little bit of knowledge and experience in the world of blogging – I also have some specific questions that require further investigation and conversation:

• privacy issues – what do I need to know?  what do I need to ensure my students understand before asking them to engage in blogging? How do we protect our identities, without inventing false identities?  How do we communicate online in a very public place?
• blogging etiquette – what are the guidelines? Are there hard and fast rules?  How to comment, and respond to comments.
• use of photos – I’d like my students to be able to post photos they have taken themselves.  Are photos of themselves & their classmates recommended?  Is explicit permission required?  How do we protect our ownership of our photos?
• Copyright, copyleft, creative commons – the latter two are new terms for me, and I need to become more aware of what each entails and requires.
• And finally, how to structure student blogging – should I require a minimun number of posts per week, per month? Topics? Purpose?  (sharing our learning, sharing our thinking, self-reflection, documenting our school day, our learning journeys….) Format?  I’d like students to explore the use of diverse types of audio and visual blogging.  Examples?  How much class time will I devote to blogging?  What will be the students’ motivation to blog?

I have penciled in a start date of Feb. 21st for actual classroom implementation – unfortunately, that will only give me a month or so in which to engage in blogging for my  EDCI 591 project, but I anticipate  I will learn  a lot in that timespan – and will continue to learn afterwards.