LiveJournal

Hey Irm! I was so glad to see that you had joined the conversation here! I want to get the time to read the blog your students wrote over the summer! Is it the same blog you invited me to join last year? If not, do you mind sending me an invitation? Deb talked about how well the sumemr blog was working out too!

I subscribed to livejournal.com; only to learn that the "technology know-it-alls" in our school district has blocked it!! It makes me positively nuts the way that individuals who are NOT teachers, and never will be, make those kinds of decisions!! And then folks like myself have to fight tooth and nail to get them unblocked, if we can argue strongly enough! After getting that out of my system, I can say I don't know if you can trust it or not. As far as I know it is ok.

One thing you could do though, perhaps as an alternative, is set up a free wikispace at: http://www.wikispaces.com/. You can control who gets to contribute and who doesn't and they can write away in that space just as they would in the journal. Those folks at wikispace are giving away free spaces to teachers and when I last visited their site, there were about 30,000 left. You might even want to check out this brief video, very cleverly done, about wikis: http://www.commoncraft.com/video-wikis-plain-english. You will see some other sites at the end of the video that also offer free wiki signup.

I think it is exciting that you have set up blogs for each of your classes. Are you using blogger in Google, or another blogging source? I look forward to knowing more about what your students end up doing with the blogs. Please also let us know here what you decide about the wikispace, and/or livejournal. By the way, do many spots get blocked at your school? Were you able to access livejournal from the school? I don't think I have even revisited the site since I learned it was blocked by the district control freaks!

I always love learning about what all of you are doing!