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Prologue and Microblogging

February 6, 2008 in Blogging, open source, Technology | No comments

I have been intrigued by Twitter since going to our state Educational Technology conference. I know it has potential and I’ve been eager to give it a try. When Will Richardson blogged about the WordPress theme Prologue, I was excited. First, I am reluctant to use “hosted solutions” especially with elementary students. Secondly, we already have a WordPress MU installed on our server space.

The first obstacle was that the theme was not packed into a zip file as most templates are. I had to learn to use a subversion client to gather the file for the template (Subversion or SVN is very cool as I have discovered and I plan to explore this avenue more). Once I put the files into a folder to ftp up to the server, it is a simple matter of selecting the Prologue template. Next, I wanted to change the opening message. After a brief look through files, I found the text in line 13 of post-form.php in the template folder. I created accounts for my students and I was good to go–or so I thought. To make this work, users had to be set to “author.”

It is all working now and my superintendent has given me the go ahead to try this out with the provision that I keep it out of public view. Only the students and I can view the contents (Using the “More Privacy Options”) extension for WordPress). Students will give it a test run today. I’ll post later along with a link to a folder with all the Prologue files for easy download.

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Moderation for School WordPressMU

January 16, 2008 in Blogging, Technology | 3 comments

I need to moderate all posts and comments for my students’ blogs. Out of the box, WPMU has a good system for taking care of comment moderation. Post moderation, while possible, is difficult to administer without a great little plugin.

To activate comment moderation you need to go to: Options –> Discussion. Under “Before a comment appears:” Check “An administrator must always approve the comment.” You can make your life easier and moderate posts via email links by checking both the “E-mail me whenever:” options. It works great–you are notified by email, through the dashboard, and the “Manage” tab that there are comments awaiting moderation.
As installed, you get no notifications of new posts. Instead one must go to the backend of each individual blog: Manage –> Posts. At the top, one must toggle status. If any are in queue for moderation, the option “Pending Review” Appears. Click the filter button and those pending review are listed. Click edit on each one to review and approve.

This is incredibly awkward and time consuming. No fewer than 8 clicks from navigating to a blog to approving a post. Initially, I couldn’t even distinguish those awaiting moderation and drafts. I honestly thought it was a bug.

Finally I found a great plugin: Peter’s Collaboration E-mails for WordPress. A new post submitted for review triggers an email with a link directly to the edit window of the post. Click the email. Click the link. Click publish. Done. No ferreting through blogs looking for new posts. It appears that most technical and administrative difficulties have been removed. At last–viable work-flow!

I’d love to discuss anyone else’s experiences using WPMU in a school setting for a technical or learning point of views. I haven’t found a place dedicated to WPMU and Education, so I set up an area on the Moodle portion of this site with a forum and a wiki dedicated to WPMU.

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Blogging: Shift from Technology to Pedagogy

January 16, 2008 in Uncategorized | No comments

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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Students Begin Blogging

January 11, 2008 in Uncategorized | No comments

My students began blogging today. As mentioned earlier, we are taking baby steps, but baby has taken several steps already. There were a few obstacles and unexpected little glitches, but went very well. The kids are incredibly excited.

To begin, I had to create an account for each child. As a security measure, registration was set so that users had to be created by an admin, rather than allowing anyone to create a login. Users must be created one by one–no big deal with my small class size. Unfortunately, WPMU requires a unique email address for each user. While a few children had email accounts, most did not. Others could use a parent’s email addresses. A surprising number had no access to the Internet at home. I ended up creating email accounts to receive the passwords that WordPress generated. Entering a class of 25 students would be a chore. I’m sure there is a way to do this through the SQL database, but that is beyond me at this point.

Once I dealt with this, all went fairly well. I guided them through the log in process on the class blog. Then we created profiles (after a long discussion of Internet safety), and changed their passwords to something secure, yet memorable. Next, I showed them how to comment upon a post that I had created. After they commented on two posts, we went on to the next step.

Since they caught on so quickly, I created a blog for each student. I had to give them admin access to their sites to allow them to customize them with templates and widgets. For the sake of security, I set the each blog’s privacy setting so that they only could be viewed by me and the individual student. Once done with customization, I will set their privileges to contributor, and open their sites to the world. With this setup. I will be the administrator for their sites and will moderate all posts and comments.

Overall, I think I have the security figured out and I am beginning to establish an administrative workflow. The kids feel empowered and energized. I also have one one of our high school teachers ready to do the same with one of his elective classes.

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Classroom Blogging: Babysteps

January 8, 2008 in Uncategorized | No comments

My fifth grade class will begin blogging next week. Once our New York State English Language Arts Tests are over on Wednesday, we will focus on real learning as opposed to test prep. I’m pretty satisfied that I have WordPress MU figured out well enough to get going.

We will start with a class blog in which I am the administrator and the students are authors. I will set it up so it is viewable by the the public, but only blog members (my students and I) can comment and they will be moderated. We’ll start by working together on the “look” of the site by choosing a template, customizing it, and placing the widgets. I will model creating and commenting on a post.

We’ll start by asking the students to reflect on the NYS ELA test that they just took. After that, I’ll have them respond to a book that I am reading to them: Running Out of Time.

They are excited as am I. Once we have it up and running, I’ll post a link.

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