Fourth Grade Bloggers Hitting Their Stride

I am so proud of my fourth grade bloggers! We're in week 4, and though the spelling and conventions may not be perfect, most of them are posting and commenting regularly and thoughtfully now, and some are including links and copyleft images, too! Check them out!

Blogger vs Edublogs

Daunted by the looming task of setting up my fourth graders' blogs, I started considering Edublogs instead of Blogger, based on the great community that Edublogs seems to have, the ability I would have to monitor kids' posts before they go up, and posts like this.
After several hours trying it out, however, I found that my setup will be easier with Blogger. (Plus, we've already laid the difficult groundwork of email and Google accounts.)

Edublogs seems best if you want each student to have their own blog, or all of your students to contribute to one blog, but not so much when you're planning about 20 team blogs with 5-7 students each. Same problem with eChalk, which hosts our school website and has recently added blog capability, but only for individuals, and with the additional problem of having their usernames, which includes their last names, in the address.

Why team blogs?
1) No one wants to go through 130 fourth graders' blogs. It may give them more control and ownership to have their own individual blogs, but they'll have a much smaller audience. This brings it down to about 20 blogs, and they're arranged by topic, which is more authentic.
2) Having team blogs about a specific (but broad) topic gives students something to write about, which should help eliminate the writer's block problem, as well as the pointless posts problem.
3) Teams provide a structure for students to help and support each other.

GoogleDocs in fourth grade

Despite great frustration on the part of about 1/3 of my students who forgot the .org at the end of their emails, or typed ps.116 instead of ps116, or put .com instead of .org, or mistyped their name or password, or any one of the many things that can go wrong when setting up or using an account where email and password are required, my fourth graders are getting acclimated to GoogleDocs.

They will be making presentations in GoogleDocs as proposals for possible topics for their blogs. They won't be presenting the presentations, but I find the format makes it easier for them to organize their thoughts than with a plain blank page.

I scaffolded the heck out of the account set-up: had them write down their username, their email address, and their password before setting up the account, so all they had to do was type what was on the paper; warned them that they had to type carefully and remember the .org and no spaces, etc., but still a full third of them didn't get it in the first class period. Not to mention the kids who had trouble with the captcha or the email verification. (I explain to them that there are mean people in the world who send out robots over the internet to clog up websites and break them, so they have to prove that they are not one of those robots by reading curvy letters and checking email, which robots can't do.)

Anyone have suggestions for easing this process with a group of 32 fourth graders?
(I wonder if GoogleApps for my domain would solve the problem by allowing me to set up the accounts for them, but I was daunted by implementation complications.)

My example blog topic proposal for my students:

CYOA sites out, blogs in

The choose-your-own-adventure website project was always one of my favorites, in theory. I loved the idea--the way it emphasized the non-linear qualities of writing and reading online, the way it gave kids such freedom in their writing and sparked their imaginations, and the sense of accomplishment they felt when the sites went up and were published to the world.

I was so discouraged, however, by the numbers of kids who were frustrated in the project--who were either super slow typers or just didn't get the concept of hypertext and linking, or both. In small groups, I could support those kids, but I didn't have enough opportunities to take them in small groups.

In addition, less and less web publishing is being done with Dreamweaver and privately hosted sites, and more and more is blog-based, so it just made sense to be shift the focus to blogging.

So starting this year, the CYOA website project has become an after-school kids-club, and in class, all fourth graders will blog instead! I know I may regret committing to moderating posts and comments from 130 kids every week, but I really think it will be worth it. And I know that the kids who had trouble with Dreamweaver may have trouble with this, too, but the satisfaction of publication comes much more quickly (and with comments!), and that extra motivation should help.