always learning

I just made a fabulous discovery!

Earlier this year I discovered the power of linked accounts in G-mail for elementary students. Today I learned how I can leverage that shortcut into individual contributing authors for our Grade 3 BlogPals blog on Edublogs. Here’s what I found out:

I would like:

• One class blog – not individual student blogs.
• The teacher or administrator to approve all postings.
• The students to be able to write whenever they want – not just in class, but I want all posts moderated by the teacher before they are published.
• Not to have to deal with individual student e-mail addresses.
• The students to have to log in so I can track who posts what, so students can’t “impersonate” each other, and so students can learn about usernames, passwords and responsibility.

So, here’s what I did:

• Created a class blog on Edublogs (in retrospect, it would have made more sense to use Learnerblogs, since this blog will mostly be authored by students. Ah well, live and learn, right?).
• Created a class e-mail account on G-mail that I have access to, as well as the class teacher.
• Created an Edublogs account for each student using the linked G-mail account feature. For each Edublogs account, I chose “Just a username, Please.”
• Logged into the main blog as the admin user and went to the Users tab.
• Added each student as a Contributor to the blog with their new “e-mail address” (which is really just the one class e-mail address using the “+StudentName” linked account option) under the “Add a User” function.

Now we have:

• Individual student log ins WITHOUT individual e-mail accounts.
• Individual student contributors to the blog WITHOUT their own blog.
• All posts approved by the blog administrator before posting.

Perfect!

This seems like the natural next step in our BlogPals project – once students are comfortable adding comments and writing posts as a “center”-type activity, we will give them individual log-ins so they can manage their posts independently.

Tags: elementary, blogging, grade3, blogpals, edublogs, contributors, student, authors, gmail, linked, email, learnerblogs,