Safety 1st
Sensible steps for safe blogging
The power of the Blog is awesome yet with that power comes responsibility - that of safeguarding your blog and your pupils from all the nasty, spammy and plain dodgy stuff that we all know is out there. These problems can be overcome and shouldn’t really be a barrier to the potential benefits to be gained from the blogging experience. Indeed, it’s a good opportunity to share and discuss these issues of web responsibility with pupils in circle and SEAL time.
You may find that your blog starts to attract undesirable interjections in the way of ’spam’ (unwanted e-mail), nuisance and uninformed comments. Most of that spam will come from ‘comments’ to you or your students’ posts. Children being children, will post comments on each others blogs, most likely in mobile phone text format, “darren u smell.” While that may indeed be true, it’s not the sort of silly stuff you want on the blog. Even well meaning but ill-thought-through comments can be harmful to self esteem. I still worry about my spelling thanks to a comment my dad made on my essay on Tornadoze!
So the sensible thing to do is to set up your blog to only show comments that you or your administrator, have approved. In your Admin Control Panel, tick the box that allows you to ‘moderate’ any comments before they appear on the blog. You will be e-mailed when a comment has been posted and then it’s up to you to approve it or delete it. This is another reason why it is good to set the administrator’s e-mail to one that you, and only you, check regularly, and carefully. Don’t be flattered into “approving” all of the comments your blog receives. Even an apparently innocuous comment such as, “Hey! Fantastic blog! Michael,” could contain a link to a site selling those bright blue pills that help various parts of your anatomy… Putting these controls in place and being a little bit wary will prevent automatically-generated spam comments but also these inappropriate and unwelcome comments from individuals. Both of the Blogging platforms we have mentioned do have effective anti-spam systems.
As we touched on earlier, before they start contributing to the blog, it is important that children are aware of the rules of ‘net-iquette’. The risks of blogging are very much the same as with any other website or email system but, because it is so easy to update blogs, anyone writing in a blog should ensure that the blog contains no information that could potentially identify them. Ideally, your guidance for blogging should form part of the school’s internet and web acceptable use policy. At the excellent Hope School blog site, Class 2 have devised their own set of ‘blog rules’ to make sure blogging is fun and safe. The rules include a range of behavioural advice from “Don’t give out your address or phone number or any personal details” to “Remember from our RE lessons, you’ve got to be a friend to have a friend.” Visit the rules and the blog itself at
‘Text from article in the July 2007 issue of Junior Education magazine’
