On the 4th Day…
God made the sun, moon, stars… I just made this post.
Time
In some ways, blogging definitely takes time. For my own site, I need the time to gather some information, create my own thoughts, take a picture, put a name/stamp on it, and then post it all. I wish it was faster… I feel a personal pressure to do it, but, sometimes, I just don’t have the time.
For school, I viewed it as a bit of a time saver, actually. I thought activities I created could be reused or pasted again in later years. I also found correcting written work and making comments faster on a blog than in paper form. I was able to return work with comments faster than I normally would have.
Legalities
I have never encountered any legal issues blogging personally or at/for school. The only time something close came up was when I asked IT Shared Services about changing our school site to a WP blog. They said “No” because of safety concerns (mainly), I think. By the winter, our Dept. of Ed. was putting on a PD day where you could come and convert your site to WordPress.
On the site listed, one thing that caught my eye was the freedom to blog about elections – I’m assuming this is an American site, talking about an American law. The last couple of elections that happened in Canada and PEI had some e-buzz around them, warning of the consequences of blogging or tweeting about results.
Spam
I’ve attracted some, but it’s never been a huge hassle. Filtering has gotten better over the years.
Inappropriate Student Responses
It’s a concern, but I’ve yet to encounter it. It’s something to talk to students about ahead of time, and to make them aware of what their actions could mean.
Copyright Issues
On my school’s site, there isn’t much content, so that isn’t much of a concern. On my own site, I think it’s cool when people share or reference my blog online. I like seeing where I get traffic from. The only thing I don’t want to happen is for people to use my pictures without permission. So, I paste my site’s name in the corner of every picture… just in case.
Legal Policies
See above… other than the above, I don’t know of anything in particular that’s in place in our district.
Audience / Facts / Feedback
For my own site, I’m catering to a pretty content-specific audience. I’m not too worried about any facts that are incorrect, as most of my blog is opinion. I have yet to encounter any negative feedback.
For kids, I think it’s like the appropriate comments section – they have to be reminded about who they’re writing for, facts (esp. plagiarism!), and respectful commenting (including handling negative blog visitors, if they happen to appear).
Posted in: Week 07: Blogs
bcourey 2:34 pm on October 20, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Amazing how many teaching opportunities you have linked to the use of blogs! Your students will benefit greatly. Interesting too how you find blogging for yourself to be very time consuming, but a time-saver for your teaching! Doesn’t that tell us that educators find very little time to do their own reflections online.
Keisha Edwards-Hamilton 6:55 pm on October 20, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Time is a huge factor when it comes on to blogging. Blogging takes time. It takes time to compile a post. I can hardly remember writing a post and publish immediately ….. I would normally write, edit, re-write, and proofread before I make hitting the submit button. There’s nothing worse than a post with bad grammar and spelling errors.
Keisha
jenaca 12:12 am on October 21, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
It is true that blogging takes time, and time is very precious these days with everything we have going on in our lives. I always try to perfect my blog, so like Keisha stated, I write, edit, write again, proofread and finally post. However, do you think that over time blogging will become easier? That we will no longer have to edit and re-edit several times?
Jenaca
mcquaid 3:05 pm on October 21, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
In some ways, I think that’s already here… it just depends on what you think a blog post is. If it can be really short, Twitter fits the bill. If it can be a combo of info from other places, it can be a semi-automatic post like Gleanr (which Dave showed us this week). I think… to make quality blog posts as we currently know them… will always take a little more time, but will also always be of a bit better quality than the bite-sized or automatic stuff.
The only “cheat” I used to use (and still would, only it doesn’t work in Chrome) is Zemanta – it’s good for generating links for you in the text, and for adding relevant pics if you want them.
Deb Kim 11:36 pm on October 21, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Thank you for the insightful post!
I agree with you that filtering has helped avoid spam but I was surprised when I saw the number of spam on the course blog. Although they are not published, there’s quite a lot of spam.
Deb