I believe humor is vital to surviving the day to day challenges that we all inevitably face.

I knew that the last day’s lesson in our blogging journey left us all feeling overwhelmed, frustrated, and very cranky.  Yet I wasn’t willing to give up.  A) I believed that these students in grade 8 would end up loving being able to blog their thoughts, questions and experiences.  B) Grade three teachers had their students blogging- therefore I should be able to teach grade 8 students how to blog and C) this was the project I had chosen for my graduate class and I wasn’t about to give up.

Day 3: Students will all be able to access their blogs, change their codes and write their first post “All about me”.

I started off the 3rd lesson with another book called Crakenstein by Samantha Berger. I fully admitted that technology brings out my Crakenstein…

We all acknowledged that indeed lesson two was frustrating but that we are willing to hang in there and continue on this journey together. All students were now into their blog sites, changing passwords and writing their first post.  Student 1 presses publish.  Then student 2 presses publish and so on.  They are excited to see their first post appearing on their blog.

Silently at first, then more and more loudly and rapidly, my internal alarm bells go off.  They can see their posts!?!  They aren’t supposed to see their posts until the teacher gives her approval!  That is what we had explained to parents that all posts would be moderated.  As students continued to work, I quickly called my tech consultant from my cell phone to explain that not one of the posts were going through the teacher’s email!

We ended this lesson with me frantically running back to the office to meet with my tech consultant to see what was going on.  In the end, no that is not how this type of blog is set.  The type of blog I was told to use and was supported and encouraged by the division will not work in this manner.  The teacher can monitor and has access to delete content if she goes into each individual students blog.  This is not nearly as efficient nor secure as hoped.

As you can imagine, my CRANKENSTEIN, was starting to emerge.  I calmly explained that other blogging platforms offer teachers the security of monitoring all posts by having them come through their email prior to them being posted on the blog site.  Long story short, I have to redo all the entire thing so that instead of having multiple sites I will now have multiple users…

My plans for this lovely Sunday afternoon: redo the blog site, AGAIN, and see if someway I can copy and paste the work the students have already done…