Blogging through the school year, part 1

I just read The Next Movement from Darren Kuropatwa, a great review of the evolution of his use of web 2.0 technologies with his classes this year. So I felt motivated to remember, reminisce, and ultimately, plan for next year - I can't believe I just said that. Anyway, here's a month by month chronology of highlights/lowlights of blogging with my third graders. The red links below point to posts on roomtwelve.com, the classroom blog, and green links point to entries on this, my personal blog:

• August, 2005 - I set up my account with classblogmeister, enter students names, passwords, post several test blogs from Billy. Lots of personal experimentation and practice for me, on classroom and personal blogs.
  
  
• September, 2005 - school starts, aargh. The kids are so little :) We start some basic keyboarding (Type to Learn), they begin using Word, begin understanding the saving/opening of documents on the school server, locating their own directories, etc. Not easy stuff, amazing that we got through this.
  
  
• October, 2005 - continuation of Sept. stuff, getting more fluid, more reliable...
  
  
• November, 2005 - They kids find out about their blog (Getting started), learn passwords, all that stuff. We also go over the Blogger's Contract, a lot of important ground to cover, the kids are itching to get started. Very exciting! On the first weekend, kids are sending comments, sort of... (Comments). I assign their first blog writing piece, Thankful writing, and then Turkey stories. Teacher is swept away and overwhelmed.
  
  
• December, 2005 - another assigned piece, Besides presents, lots of making of snowflakes, get together our first PowerPoint presentations, Snowflake Presentations Online!, I end the calendar year by assigning One More Gift. This was during our winter break, and led to a very big event in January, 2006.

End of Part 1.

As my kids often said when they just plain ran out of time, to be continued...