Blogging Guidelines and Policies

I am in the process of creating an acceptable user policy for our elementary school students to use blogs at school.
I have found several amazing resources that are helping me put this policy together. Thank you to all who were willing to share their work.
I started out exploring a Wiki from Adavis. That took me to the Safe Blogging Post from Mathematical Musings. Mrs. Simpson has put together a great Blogging Policy for her students. She cites the following sources:
Darren Kuropatwa, Bud The Teacher, East Side Community High School, Vicki Davis, and Anne Davis.

I have used most of her content and changed some of the vocabulary to make it more appropriate for the elementary school situation. Here is the final product of Blogging Guideline & Policies for the students of our school. Feel free to adapt any further.

Blogging Guidelines

Blogging is a very public activity. Anything that gets posted on the internet stays there. Forever ! Deleting a post simply removes it from the blog it was posted to. Copies of the post may exist scattered all over the internet. That is why we are being so careful to respect your privacy and using screen names only.

Students using blogs are expected to treat blogspaces as classroom spaces. Speech that is inappropriate for class is not appropriate for our blog. We expect that you will conduct yourself in a manner reflective of a representative of this school.

Never EVER EVER give out or record personal information on our blog. Our blog exists as a public space on the Internet. Don’t share anything that you don’t want the world to know. For your safety, be careful what you say, too. Don’t give out your phone number or home address. This is particularly important to remember if you have a personal online journal or blog elsewhere.

Again, your blog is a public space. And if you put it on the Internet, odds are really good that it will stay on the Internet. Always! That means a few years from now when you are trying to get accepted into another school or university; it might be possible for them to discover what you wrote. Be sure that anything you write you are proud of. It can come back to haunt you if you don’t.

Freedom of speech comes with personal responsibility. Everything you post represents you. You shouldn’t post anything you wouldn’t be comfortable with anyone, from your parents or grandmother to teachers, viewing.

Blogging Policy
To use the “Insert your School’s Name” school blogs, you must agree to the following statements.

1. I will not use any inappropriate language.
2. I will not say anything that I would not say in school.
3. I will not use fighting words or provoke anyone.
4. I will avoid the use of chat language.
5. I will not use tOgGlE-cAsE or ALL-CAPS.
6. I will try to spell everything correctly.
7. I will only use my screen name and address my classmates with theirs.
8. I will not post pictures of myself.
9. I will not give out any personal information about myself or anyone else.
10. I will not share personal stories
11. I am responsible for anything posted in my screen name.
12. I will not plagiarize (Copy things from someone else and pretend that I wrote it).
13. I will use common sense.

YouTube.com & Google Videos

I am having a great time looking through video clips at YouTube and Google Video. The easiness of embedding the video into your own classroom webpage or blog makes it particularly interesting for us elementary school teachers, since we can be assured that no “sex kitten” advertisement will pop up unexpectedly on the side. Just be careful, since students when on their own can click on the video and are taken to the YouTube site.
There are two areas of videos in the foreign language classroom that I want to concentrate this school year on:

1. Using videos made by others
2. Create my own videos

Ideas for using videos:

• Search for funny commercials in your target language
• Search for touristy videos in your target country
• Search for music videos in your target language

Ideas for making videos:

• Have students create a story in target language and act them out
• Create an game show
• Sightseeing Tour of areas of interest in the target culture

Feel free to contribute to ideas about context of videos or software/hardware tools to use in creating videos with or for your students.

The coolcatteacher has created a video (about online safety) with her students using a Logitech Camera where her students are “morphed” into Avatar characters. The facial expressions stay the same. This is how coolcatteacher explained it:

The one I showed here is slightly edited in Pinnacle Studio 10. However, the software with the web cams is what morphed the face. The web cams are $95 each — they are logitech QuickCams. I got them from CDW-g and they rest on the top of the desktop which allows the camera to be picked up and go mobile (especially if you have a laptop.) The Logitech software is worth the $95 because it does everything!
I think this approach would help out in the “protecting” the students’ identity arena (always an issue in our elementary school) and at the same time giving the shier students a voice and “face” who otherwise would not go in front of the camera.

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Tagzania: Using Google Earth and Tags

Just found a great tool thanks to the blog ReadWriteWeb.com.
It is called Tagzania

Users can tag any location on earth, which in turn let’s users also search for any location via tags. It then zooms in via Google Earth to the chosen location. Teachers can easily copy the image for the map and/or embedd the map on their website for their students.