vtlc2007 - Bad Blog

Bad Blog
Suffolk Schools

Staff blogs
Three areas of concern
- Risk - afraid of what people say
  - Easty to use and cheap to manage
- Productivity _people wasting time
  - Safety and controls
- We don't see the instructional value
  - Need to develop a clear instructional focus
Foundational policies and behavior
- Safe practices for students
- Bobbie eisenstocks's rules of the road
- AUP in place - special permission
  - Have a bullet in the AUP regarding when you blog you speak for the district
Infrastructure and system config
- Wordpress
- Run on a linux server and Apache and SQL and PHP
- Simple to install
No unauthorized blogs
- Tie blog to staff accounts with active directory
- Plugin that points to active directory
- Active staff members have blogs
No web warehouses
- Set allowed file-types and 50 MB quotas
- Currently, biggest blogs have some videos, etc. - 16 mb
- Quota is only for files other than the text part of the blog
Blog owner's manual - setup
- Emphasizes a professional presence
- Reviewed themes for appropriateness
- Some themes required linking back to the creator's site…took some of those off
  - Need to screen the themes
- Enable commnet moderation
  - Anon or not?
  - All comments require approval
- Early Apdopters established techniques
- ITRTs develop welcome workshops
Posting Do's and don’t's
- Clearly identify yourself
- No numbers
  - Student information
- No promotional endorsements
- Professional rapport
  - Invisibility of sarcasm
  - Discomfort of familiarity
Monitor
- Developed stie-wide RSS feeds
- Is a plug-in that provides the ability for system monitoring of the blog entries
http://blogs.spsk12.net
- Presentation handouts are on Chris's site
- Chris Blaug