Just some ideas. A great concept.

– dave –

This is a great idea and I’m glad to see that you are using the blog to assess their understanding of the issues presented in your classroom. As the previous poster suggested, I’d set the criteria with the kids before you begin. In class, give an overview of the blogging assignment. Afterward, pose the question “What do you think would make a great blog for this class?” On the board or overhead, list any/all suggestions made by kids. After a dozen or so criteria, work with the kids to categorize their criteria under different headings based on their similarities. For example, suggestions “interesting blog topics”, “well-argued positions”, and “blog topics relate to class topics” might fall under the larger category of “Blog Content” (may be a bad example but you get the idea). What begins as a dozen or so specific criteria by kids ends up as 3 or 4 larger main criteria. From here, you can even crite up a rough rubric on the spot showing 3 or 4 levels of achievement or create a checklist of the 4 criteria with a description of each.

This may take an hour or so just to generate the criteria and rubric, but I strongly suggest that the kids will have a much greater idea of what is expected of them in doing so. After doing this project for the term, collect sample blog postings at different levels of achievement so kids can see exemplars of what to do (and what not to do) so your next-year students can actually see the difference between excellent blog postings and poor blog postings across your different criteria.

You’d be wise to take a few minutes yourself to generate a list of criteria that are important for you in this project, just in case the kids miss something and you want to throw in an extra criteria on the list. You’d be surprised, however, to see how accurate the kids will be in generating this list of criteria. In addition to the content/debate format criteria, I recommend including a section on ‘blogging etiquette’ or ‘appriopriateness’ or something relating to the fact that kids will be debating with each other without personally attacking each other or being rude.

I can’t wait to see how this shakes down Brett. I’ll be sure to stay tuned

A friend pointed out a great free blogging service that more teachers are using, called http://www.21publish.com . It would allow you to create a blog for each class, then allow you to create blogs within that class blog for each student. Students would log in, and you could set privileges as to who is able to both see blog postings and comment to postings. This would help to increase student privacy while still allowing them to post detailed entries. Like Blogger, it allows students to upload photos, create links, etc. Check it out.

All the best in this!
Danny Maas
TILT – Teachers Improving Learning with Technology
http://tilttv.blogspot.com

I posted about it here: http://theopenclassroom.blogspot.com/2005/08/good-day-at-chalkface.html and on the next day as well
anyway cheers
Hope these are helpful comments.
Love your work
Jo