Blogging 101 with ELL Support

Mack's ELL Support students have finally started setting up their WordPress blog accounts. To do so, we used the desktop computers because it is so much easier to see the whole thing on a large screen. A few students had problems because WordPress didn't activate their accounts properly and therefore they don't have access to all of the necessary dashboard features. Fortunately for us, Karen Justl is always on the ball and already working on finding solutions. I was very grateful to Laurie Pickup's detailed blogging lesson plan and followed it almost to a t. I wish I had been reading it more closely, so I would have realized a long time before our latest Power-to-Learn meeting that students could actually change the password that was assigned to them initially! Felt like a real knucklehead about not figuring this out on my own and also felt really bad for having my students memorize such a random and rather hard to recall passcode! Each student now uses his/her MMDDYY password, thankfully. :) We are at the point where most students chose a blog theme that they liked and created their own blog title. They have also dabbled with widgets and should all have a link to my blog, " Words Across the World of 2.0." At this time, my ELL Support students have only written comments on my blog and are yet to write their own blog entry. I intended them to do so yesterday via the iPod touches. Fortunately, I had figured beforehand out that I had to enable each of my students' blog account for remote publishing after school was out and had to manually do so for each of my students from my desktop computer. [setting > writing > Enable the WordPress, Movable Type, MetaWeblog and Blogger XML-RPC publishing protocols. ] After that time-consuming oversight, the plan was that we were going to wrote our first blog entry yesterday; unfortunately, it took almost the whole lesson to set each blog up via the app! For the time being, I have decided to put blogging on hiatus until our time in the computer lab next week to be fair to everyone, since it will take WordPress a week or so to fix the blog accounts that did not activate properly. I am looking forward to being able to have my students blog from the iPod touches soon, though. [efm]