Thursday, October 2, 2008

The First Day of the Project
Well, we started our blogs today. Most of the students seemed to be really excited about starting their own blogs. One student said he felt like he was in college! Although most of them had heard of blogs or at least knew about them from Myspace, none of them actually had a blog, so it was new territory. They did an excellent job creating their gmail and blogger accounts. The part that took the longest was figuring out what to name their blog. I asked them to use their name or something specific to them in the name of their blog so that I could tell them apart. It was difficult for them to come up with ideas that they were happy with, but eventually they did and actually they all came up with really good names. I also asked that they keep their URL the same as their blog name. That didn't always work because some of the names were already in use, so we just added an 08 to the end of their blog title in the URL and that seemed to work.The other main problem we had was that we were creating multiple blogs from the same IP address since we are on wireless computers and blogger tried to keep us from doing it thinking we were spammers. I can see that this might continue to be a problem. I see that now blogger has blocked most of our blogs thinking they are spam blogs and we have to request a review to get them to unblock the blog. I hope that it goes smoothly and we don't have a bunch of blogs deleted.