BLOG ADMIN

Two key elements to blog administration are:

1. A central spreadsheet as the record keeping / information management for all blogs associated with the school
2. The use of blogger admin accounts to establish any new blogs to be associated with the school, individual learners, classes and teachers

A spreadsheet - for making and managing all blogs

Template available here, this template has pre-set scripts to make it easier to organise and populate the spreadsheet - please don't add or move content to different columns. Image below is of tabs/pages on the spreadsheet. When you have more than one blog admin account, continue using this one spreadsheet, and share it to the new blog admin account.

Admin - blog admin accounts and passwords listed

Twitterfeed - This page is linked to a script that feeds posts by all blogs listed on it, to the @TokiPounamu twitter account automatically. This will be set up with support from the facilitator. The twitter feed helps us to extend our reach for an authentic audience in a managed way. This

Class blogs - The class blogs have an important place in Learn Create Share as a model for individual learners blogs and as the primary sharing of learning for classes without individual student blogs. Having these recorded in the central spreadsheet means that we are able to create, manage and keep a record of the class blogs. This helps us to be Cybersmart and secure in our digital footprint at an organisational level.

Class list - Having a record of all learners blogs helps us to manage these as the learners move classes as well as to create them methodically in keeping with blog settings / protocols. The sheet uses both information bought in from Hapara teacher dashboard and formulas to help auto creation of blog titles/links with consistency. This process is fully described in the 'establishing the individual blog' section.

Learners who have left - The blogs are an important record of learning and a place where we can track the process of archiving the blog OR transferring the ownership to the cluster high school or another cluster primary school that the learners are going to. For transferring students the blog URL address is preserved (not changed to match the new school) so that the learners can preserve their audience and connections that they have built up in their blogging. This process is fully described in the 'archiving individual blogs' and 'transitions' sections.

School domain Google accounts for blog administration

The blog admin accounts are needed to enable the management of learner blogs where the administration is likely to be transferred from teacher to teacher as the learners move through the school. A blog admin account is used to establish the blogs with each google account being able to own up to 100 blogs. This limit will mean that you will need to have move than one blog admin account over time. The blog admin accounts need to be created by a domain administrator, and is looked after by the lead teacher in the school. We suggest the accounts are named with a progressive convention: blogadmin1, blogadmin2 for example.

Note

Note it is illegal for students under the age of 13 to be administrators of their own blog. We strongly suggest all blogs including teachers and class blogs get established using an admin account as all are associated with the schools Google Suite for Education domain. When all blogs are managed centrally under the school domain, this provides additional protections for students and teachers.