B - Day

No...it isn't my birthday. Today B-Day stands for Blog Day. We jumped right in today and started the blogs. For the first class things went smoothly. The blogs were unblocked and then the kids were able to create their accounts. They went through the set-up and were even able to write their first posts. The problem occurred when they went to view their posts...they were blocked. The IT lady had to get each kid's blog URL and un-block it individually. I am finding that I am creating a lot of work for her, but she is a trooper and is helping a lot.
The kids seem to be more impatient than me. I knew we would encounter problems - most likely with the dreaded "ACCESS DENIED" sign popping up on the screen - but the kids had a very low tolerance for this. Maybe they had experienced this too often before and were tired of seeing it. By the time I was finished with the class, I was in a full body sweat from running around to the students and troubleshooting. Really, though, first period went fairly smoothly. Third period was a whole other story. EVERYTHING was blocked, and Mrs. Johnson hadn't changed anything from 1st period, so she didn't know why it wasn't working the same. The kids were frustrated, and I was worried for a while that we wouldn't get any blogs done for this class. Eventually it worked out, though.
I have started to read through the initial posts, and I have tried to comment on each one briefly. I hope I can find the time to do this after each blogging day; I think it will be important for the kids to see that I am keeping up with their posts. It probably won't occur to them that I have 50 of them to read through. The most shocking thing so far has been the horrible punctuation, spelling, grammar, and capitalization in their posts. So many kids don't capitalize the word "I." I know they know they are supposed to - so why don't they? If I failed to capitalize the word "I" in one of my blogs, I probably wouldn't be able to sleep at night. I guess that is why I am the English teacher.

Check out the students' blogs on the left, and you can judge for yourself how this project is working.