In the last entry I said I was going to post about trying to decide how to set up a set of individual blogs for my class but I ran out of time.

I got a ton of advice on both wordpress MU, with a complete setup guide from David and on lyceum from one of the programmers.

Eventually I decided to stick to what I am most familiar with Pivot. Originally I was considering having blogs for all of the p6 & 7 children (90), but I need to figure out if the idea is worthwhile before I ask my colleagues to try this.

Setting up a 20 user pivot blog wasn’t all that hard, I could edit the config files directly to add 20 users and 20 categories (I for each sub-weblog) using my old favourite Supecard to format the data and create and encrypt the password. SC fired out 20 stylesheets from a template too.

Setting up the 20 sub-weblogs was beyond my abilities to edit the config file directly, so I did that by hand and I quickly exported some random header images from fireworks.

So I now have 20 weblogs and an associated class blog. We have only made a couple of posts so far but it seems to be going ok technically. I’ve used a new beta of pivot which has added comment moderation and I am trying that out. I’ve also use a theme for the admin section of the new blog so that it looks different from the admin section of the main school blogs which should help to avoid confusion.

The next step is to arrange for time for all of the children to post regularly and to let them design their own header graphics. The first will hopefully be solved by weekly visits to the media room and I hope the posting rate will increase as the children’s typing improves. The second might be more difficult as we don’t have any more interesting image software on the pcs than microsoft photo editor or paint. I am thinking of combining text and images in word, pasting into paint and exporting as a jpeg. (any easier ways?)

My only worry is time, the first couple of posts pretty much took up an hour of media room time and there are a lot of other things we want to do as well. (nearly all my worries on this blog are to do with time, must be an age thing).

The children are quite excited about having their own webspace, but are thinking of it as a activity for a specific time at the moment, I hope I can change this.