The school year’s almost ended in the Northern Hemisphere!

Everyone’s focusing on holidays and completing end of year tasks.

But what about your class and student blogs?

Now’s the time to tidy them up — it’ll save you frustrations when you come back from your holidays.

And here’s our tips to help you based on the questions we’re asked in Edublogs Support.

Approaches used with student blogs

There are two main scenario’s for the fate of student blogs – unless you’re part of a school-wide program:

Dealing with Student blogs that are discontinuing

While these two scenario require a different approach, they both have to deal with student blogs that are no longer required such as:

1. Students that don’t wish to continue blogging
2. Students leaving the school

Unless the parent, student or school absolutely demands these blogs be deleted, it’s better not to delete the blogs. These blogs are part of their journey, one day they may change their mind, want to check them out or another teacher might like to use them.

Delete is DELETE; it’s impossible to undelete them.

Here’s what we recommend:

1.  Set up an Archive page on your class blog of all student blogs

• Here’s an example on Huzzah’s class blog.

2.  Change their role to Subscriber so they can’t write any posts

• Only possible if you are an admin user on their blog

3.  Disable the ability for comments to be added

• Select ‘Automatically close comments on articles older than 14 days” in Settings > Discussion

Dealing with Student blogs that are discontinuing - if you’re using an Edublogs Campus site

Edublogs Campus provides total control of all blogs in ways not achievable using other blogging solutions.  This means you have extra options for managing them at the end of the school year.

Some Campus sites allow students blogs to remain live on their site after the student has left their program while others require the students to move their blogs to another service.

If your decision is for them to move their blogs here’s how to do it:

1.  Encourage those that want to keep blogging to set up a new blog on Edublogs.org or any other standard blogging platform.

2. Give them these instructions to import the contents from their Campus blog into their new blog

3.  Once their blogs have been moved go to Site Admin > Blogs and click on the archive link underneath their blog URL to archive their blog

• This just archives their blog and if needed you’ll be able to easily bring back online
• Please don’t delete their blog as it will be deleted and you can’t bring it back online if you make a mistake

Supporting Students that want to continue to blog

For students that want to keep their blog you need to consider who monitors the blog.  Or does some one even need to?

Some teachers organise for parents to take over the responsibility. Or perhaps you are happy to continue to support them?

Organising parents to take over

If a parent (or another teacher) is taking over the role of assisting the student blog then you’ll need to add them as a user to the blog using Users > Add New - here’s the instructions you’ll need to follow.

Once they’ve been added ask them or your student to log in and remove you as a user from the blog.

• This’ll remove their blog from your Dashboard > My Blogs area.

If you used gmail+ for the student username and blog then you might want to discuss options for using an alternative email address.

Here’s the two locations you’ll need it changed:

1. Users > Your Profile when the student is logged in with their username
2. Settings > General

Monitoring Student blogs you continue to support

If you’re happy to continue to support their blogging then we recommend you do it using separate folders for posts and comments in Google Reader.

Here’s how you set it student blogs in Google Reader!

You’ll find that posts and comments decreases and you’ll be able to focus on those that are keen to continue.

About your Edublogs Pro subscription

If you use an Edublogs Pro blog as your class blog:

1. You can create as many student blogs are you want – there are no restrictions
2. You can only enable features on up to 50 blogs and change which blogs these are at any time

Creating a memento of their Student blog

Obviously if you don’t delete their blogs they will remain online and be a keepsake.

However if you do want the student blogs in alternative formats you could create a PDF version using BlogBooker.

Refer to page 9 of this Scribd Document.

Approaches used with Class Blogs

Most educators use the same class blog each year.  You’ll get ideas on how they do this by looking at our Class blog list here.

Hiding content from new students

The easiest option to protect content you don’t want the next group of students viewing is to change the posts to draft mode, for those posts you want to hide, by going to Posts > Edit.

If you want to re-use the same post without the comments you just copy the content of the post into a new post then publish it when ready.

Handing a Class blog over to new teacher when you change schools

If you’re leaving your school and another teacher is going to be using the class blog here’s what you need to do:

1. Add the teacher as a user to the blog using Users > Add New - here’s the instructions you’ll need to follow
2. Change the email address in Settings > General to their email address
3. For Edublogs Pro blogs – cancel your Edublogs Pro subscription and get them to resubscribe when the subscription expires (as per the date shown in the Pro tab) by following these instructions
4. Change the email address attached to your username in Users > Your Profile

Changing your Class blog URL

Occasionally youll have situations where you do need to change the URL of your blog.

While you can’t change a blog URL you can create a new blog with your preferred blog URL and import all content from an existing blog into your new blog.

Here is how you do it:

1. Create your new blog attached to your existing username as per these instructions.
2. Log into your original blog dashboard
3. Click on Tools > Export
4. Click on Download Export file and save onto your hard drive
5. Log into your new blog
6. Click on Tools > Import
7. Click on WordPress
8. Browse to locate Download Export file.   Make sure you select Down and import the attachments.
9. Click on upload file and import

This will import all pages, posts,  comments, files.

You will need to manually set up your blog theme and widgets.   The best way to do this is to have both blogs open in separate browser tabs or windows and work between the two blogs to change the theme and add in the widget.

You’ll find detailed instructions in this Scribd Document.

Backing Up Your Blog

Keeping posts by former students while making them easily findable

Most educators manage student posts on class blogs by getting the students to assign their name as a category to the post before they publish their post.  This makes it easy to find and manage their work.

Here’s a detailed explanation of how educators use categories to organise student posts on a class blog.

The easiest option to keep their posts while making them still easy to locate is to assign a parent category to designate their year.

• You can use numbers at the start of categories to change the order they’re displayed.

Here’s an example of how to set up parent categories:

You’ll need to make sure ‘Show Hierarchy’ is selected in your category widget.

Final Thoughts

Hope this has helped!

1. What other advice would you give?
2. Or are there any other questions you would like answered?

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During a time when most of the US and much of the world is facing funding shortfalls in education, sadly technology budgets are often one of the first to be slashed. Is this a good place to start? While I never thought so, I didn’t until now have any good hard evidence to back that up.

Being a bit numbers obsessed (I was a math teacher in my former days), I enjoy spending my time looking over the site visitor statistics for Edublogs. This morning I found myself taking a look at the number of visitors from each state in the US.

I wanted to know if the number of visitors we get from each state is proportional to the number of students in each state.

I was expecting to find that our visitors would be randomly and equitably distributed around the country.

But I was wrong. There were a few states that seemed to have much higher traffic than what their population would suggest. There were also a handful of states that were severely underrepresented.

There are many factors that could account for this – such as access to computers in the classroom or the existence of local or statewide blogging platforms other than Edublogs. Or perhaps blogging just isn’t that states thing and we haven’t done a good enough job letting them know about it.

However, then I visited this site here for the most recent and comprehensive rankings on state achievement that I could find.

What you see in the table below may shock you. I went through and identified the states that are 8 or more away in “Edublogs Ranking” either direction than you would expect based on their population.

Three out of five of the lowest performing states also are underrepresented in their use of Edublogs. And all of the underrepresented states are in the bottom third on achievement.

Even more interesting (er, exciting) is that three out of the top five performing states visit Edublogs more than you would expect based on their population! And all overrepresented states are in the top half of performance.

I’m not suggesting at all that Edublogs is responsible for the achievement (though that would be nice), but clearly, states that make technology use available to students do appear to have a significant advantage here.

Being the math nerd that I am, I will admit that I haven’t applied any tests of statistical significance to the data here nor do I share this as if I have done formal research on the matter. However, even cursory data such as this shows that technology in the classroom can be powerful!

What do you think?

I used this site here for the state demographic information. The “Edublogs Ranking” was taken from Google Analytics based on several million visitors over the past 30 days.