Great comment on Getting Heard by a teacher on the benefits of blogging

Getting Heard is an exciting project by Anne Davis linked from Anne’s post Turned a corner! where she talks about inappropriate comments on student Keithel’s Blog.

Keithel’s Blog turns out to be very interesting but one of the comments I read was way over my line.

Secondary school is obviously a different environment than primary, I wouldn’t even start a conversation with children on some of this stuff in my class (We do talk about comments). I am rethinking my position on moderation, again.

At the moment I pre moderate the posts by my class, not heavily, just a quick spell and sense check, for the same reasons as I would make suggestions and corrections to a piece of work that was going on the wall.

I post moderate comments, (I’ve very rarely had to remove anything, mostly spam) we want to encourage comments which moderation might discourage. I check comments several times a day, but if we started getting the kind of comment Keithel received I’d move to pre-moderating comments pretty quickly.

The whole idea of opening a primary classroom to the world is powerful and scary, I really want blogs to be in my classroom for all the reasons in the comment lined above, to keep using them I need to keep them a safe place for 10 year olds. If blogs are going to spread to other classrooms and maybe teachers who don’t spend the early hours reading blogs they need to be demonstrably safe places.