I have dis­cov­ered some neat ways to use a blog in a class­room and I thought I would share them with you here. Using a few plu­g­ins you can facil­i­tate a pretty engag­ing online con­ver­sa­tion with your stu­dents while still main­tain­ing a rea­son­able level of secu­rity. I use this tech­nique to dis­cuss lit­er­a­ture that I assign to stu­dents, but I could be applied to any topic.

Step 1: Tech­ni­cal Preparation

You will need to have a com­puter for every stu­dent as well as one for your­self, you can either use a 1 to 1 lap­top set up or a tra­di­tional com­puter lab.

You will need to have a Word­Press self-hosted blog set up (I sup­pose you could use WordPress.com or another blog­ging plat­form, but my expe­ri­ence is with WP). Once your blog is up and run­ning install the fol­low­ing plu­g­ins (for instruc­tions on installing plu­g­ins click here).

  • Admin Man­age­ment Xtended — this plu­gin allows you to quickly edit, approve, delete or reply to com­ments in-line with­out a page refresh which is essen­tial for mov­ing quickly.
  • WP Com­ment Remix — this plu­gin adds some use­ful func­tion­al­ity to com­ments includ­ing a quote but­ton and a link to all com­ments that you haven’t yet replied to.
  • Reload­E­v­ery Plu­gin for Fire­fox — this plu­gin for Fire­fox will make a page reload at a cer­tain inter­val that you set.

The fol­low­ing plu­g­ins are nice but not essential.

  • Min­i­mum Com­ment Length — this plu­gin does what it says, allow­ing you to set a min­i­mum char­ac­ter length for comments.
  • GD Star Rat­ing — a pretty com­pre­hen­sive set of rat­ing tools. Lets users give star or thumb rat­ings to nearly every aspect of the blog includ­ing posts and com­ments. Great for enhanc­ing interactivity.

Step 2: Con­tent Preparation

Assign a read­ing to your stu­dents in advance. It can be any­thing and in an for­mat. Be sure to tell your stu­dents that they will be expected to answer ques­tions on the read­ing in the future. Next before you begin the activ­ity write at least three new posts con­tain­ing ques­tions about the read­ing. The more open ended you leave the ques­tions, the more dis­cus­sion you will generate.

Step 3: Run­ning the Conversation

Open the com­ments admin­is­tra­tion page of your blog, you should see a ver­ti­cal list of all of your com­ments here. Right click on the page and set the Reload­E­v­ery time (see video). I like to set it at 1 minute because I am kind of a slow typ­ist and if the page reloads while you are respond­ing to a com­ment you will lose it, but if you are a faster typ­ist set it at 30 seconds.

Now sim­ply mod­er­ate and respond to the com­ments as they come in.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2aC30m70Bg[/youtube]