Wee, sleekit, cow'rin', tim'rous blog

But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men
     Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
     For promised joy.
          -Robert Burns
          "To a Mouse"

Today was day two of blog setup with my tenth graders, and I think my experience will be quite instructive to those who will try something similar in the coming days. If you want to skip over the story of the trials and tribulations and simply read the lessons, scroll down a bit. They're in bold.

First of all, Google's tools contain many layers of protection to ensure that scammers and software "bots" can't sign up for thousands of fake accounts. When twenty-five students in a class all try to sign up for Gmail accounts at the same time from the same place, these protections kick in. So, the first thing that happened on Friday was that about a third of my kids couldn't create accounts. The next layer kicked in when the kids all tried to create blogs at the same time. Google's software asked them to verify that they were, in fact, real humans. Students could verify this by giving a phone number and receiving a confirmation code via text message, but that obviously doesn't really work in a classroom setting.

Ultimately, I had to assign the creation of Gmail accounts and Blogger blogs as "homework." When the kids are working from their home computers, Google no longer sees them as potential bots and allows them to create accounts.

Wrinkle number two (three?): today we tried to configure all the blog settings so they're viewable only by invited guests. That meant collecting all the students' new Gmail addresses (easy), e-mailing a list of those e-mails to all the students (relatively easy), and then having the students paste those lists into the invitation box in the blog settings (still not so hard).

Then, the students each began to receive twenty-four e-mails from their classmates, each bearing an invitation link. Students have to click those links, accept the invitations by entering their Google password each time, view the blogs, click "follow," and then click "follow this blog" again in the popup window (complicated).

Another wrinkle: the school laptops run Windows XP and Internet Explorer 7. What that means is that the box on the blogs that shows followers and displays the "follow this blog" link may not load for all students. I believe this is because IE 7 doesn't handle Java so well. Kids who brought their own laptops had no issues. We're not scheduled for an upgrade to Windows 7 and the newest version of IE until next summer, so this whole year we're stuck.

By the end of the short period, all kids were invited to all blogs and most blogs were being followed by most kids (each blog has about 18 of the 25 potential followers). Despite the wrinkles, it was a relatively successful period, and they certainly got their collaborating on as they helped each other out and taught each other how to set up the blogs and follow each other.

So, the lessons?
1. Have students create Gmail accounts as homework, not during class.
2. Have students create the blogs as homework, not during class.
3. Be aware that students may not be able to "follow" each other's blogs right away if they're working on a school laptop.