My students and I are finding our way through WordPressMU (WPMU). I have worked through security, configuration, and administrative work flow. The kids post and comment. Now we focus more on learning.
Students customized their sites using themes, widgets, and blogroll. I set them to contributor so the posts would be moderated before appearing. Comments are also moderated. It was time consuming and awkward to trudge through each site to approve everything, so I set the blogs to email me any time new content is submitted. The email includes the message and handy administrative links to approve or delete. There is only one glitch–when a new post (as opposed to comment) is created, it is not put into a moderation cue, so I have to either have a contributor tell me when they have submitted content for review, or check through their drafts for content not posted. It appears to be a known issue and I hope to work through the hacks to make it work. I’d love to ask for a fix in the WPMU support forum, but unfortunately it is not a very friendly place and I suspect the response would be that I have no business using the software with my lack of PHP coding knowledge.
Most students have made a few posts. Now they use the blogroll links to visit each other and comment upon each others’ posts. It’s interesting to watch the interaction among the students. Our district superintendent asked for a login and replied to student posts.
Beyond that, I will shifting my attention from the technology to the teaching aspects of using blogs with my students. Right now, I am watching an on–line community start to take shape among my students.
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Tags: blog, classroom, educational technology, wordpress, wordpressmu
This work by Stephen J. O’Connor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
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