Communicate the rules to administration for their approval.

You certainly want to run your gated blogger agreement past your administrator, if your school does not have a “standard” agreement for classroom blogs. Remember that the first time is the tough one. After the first year, this will become routine!

After you have had some success with a pilot blog and proven the power of blogs as an instructional tool, you may be able to convince your school district to consider "hosting" student blogs on school-owned servers. They may want to install Wordpress --available for free. . The tech department will need to make a little effort, but having a safe, no-cost tool completely under school control would avoid many administrative concerns, including maintaining a complete archive of what students write.

Communicate the rules to the students and parents.

Use EVERY means you have to share the blogger agreement and the text of what parents and students have signed. Include it on the actual blog. Post it in your classroom. Hand it out at back-to-school night and conferences. Make it easy for everyone to refresh their memories about the rules of the blog. You can even highlight great blog postings to get it going by allocating one bulletin board to print outs of great posts and comments (and, of course, a copy of the blogger agreement). One bulletin board idea taken care of!

OK, I get it---Take me to the tools to get started
or continue one step at a time...

 

Spell out the consequences of violating the rules.

TeachersFirst offers a sample gated blogger agreement that you may edit to fit your circumstances. If you feel the penalties should be more specific, by all means add more detail. This is a Microsoft Word document. Please read the copyright notice and directions at the top carefully.

Ask all students and parents to indicate their awareness of/agreement with the rules.

This is simple. They sign the agreement. You keep the copies. If you have students who could possibly have forged signatures, make a phone call to verify. If your young students need a simpler version, adapt this one or write your own.

Take me to the next step.