This education blog has been created by ClassChatterLive.com http://www.classchatterlive.com/site/3 Now in ClassChatterLive you can organize your student's assignment blogs intocategories. This is great for teachers who keep a large collection of Assignment Blogs. From the assignment page you will see a new link to "ManageCategories" from the new page you will be able to create newcategoriesfor yourassignments. EachCategorywill be applied across all your classes. After you have created yourcategoriesyou may addexistingassignmentsto thecategoriesor create new Assignment Blogs for thosecategories. I hope this makes ClassChatterLive more functional for both teachers and students. http://www.classchatterlive.com/page/c9f3ce16cc1bbc3048b3d9e5a652a495 http://www.classchatterlive.com/page/c9f3ce16cc1bbc3048b3d9e5a652a495 Mon, 06 Apr 2009 08:34:17 PDT We are introducing an excitingopportunityfor existing ClassChatter.com users. You now can sign up for a free trial of ClassChatterLive. Explore all thebenefitsof ClassChatterLive for yourself with 30 days of restriction free use of the site, with zero obligation. All of your classes, students, assignments, blogs and cMail will be transfered instantly over to ClassChatterLive. At the end of thirty days if you do not choose to upgrade you may continue using ClassChatter.com as if you never left. I have worked hard to make this a no loose zero riskopportunityfor ourexistingusers. If you are interested, look for link on your Class Dashboard or copy the following address into your web browser. http://www.classchatterlive.com/freetrial.php http://www.classchatterlive.com/page/be7d543bd898c23d51dc4ce202a3f2b2 http://www.classchatterlive.com/page/be7d543bd898c23d51dc4ce202a3f2b2 Wed, 18 Mar 2009 12:29:54 PDT Classchatter.com now has a new feature. Read Only! When this feature is activated students will be able to read but not post in Personal and Topic Blogs. This is a great way to assign students to read blogs, but block inappropriatecomments from being posted. We will be adding this feature to ClassChatterLive in the near future. Please keep those feature suggestionscomingyou have no idea when your might show up in the site. http://www.classchatterlive.com/page/c1c68487e7685b5ec1c76a1172f86432 http://www.classchatterlive.com/page/c1c68487e7685b5ec1c76a1172f86432 Mon, 16 Mar 2009 11:41:51 PDT In addition to our full blog, I have created a Twitter Feed to help keep our users updated to what is going on in ClassChatter. I will be posting smaller updates that do not warrant a full blog post, and some of my thoughts of Educational Technology. If you are a Twitter user I invite you to follow my Tweets and post replys directly on Twitter. You can find our Twitter feed here: http://www.twitter.com/dandeluca http://www.classchatterlive.com/page/47f269bf8f59fc226366ce32759e195b http://www.classchatterlive.com/page/47f269bf8f59fc226366ce32759e195b Wed, 11 Mar 2009 14:39:20 PDT There are some concerns regarding the use of blogs in a secondary education classroom. It is always vitally important to protect student privacy for both legal andethical reasons. This is doubly important when materials are posted on the Internet, themost public of forums. The federal law regarding student privacy is known as The FamilyEducation Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). It is important to note that FERPA wasratified before the invention of the Internet. Many of its provisions therefore are awkwardto use with modern educational technology. FERPA outlines that personally identifiablestudent information may only be released in two situations. First schools may release"directory information" if certain conditions are met. Directory information includes a student's name, address, email address, and similar information. (Baskin & Surratt 2001)Schools may also release student information with parental consent. A student's work isprotected under this provision. Any work that is personally identifiable should not beposted to the public. This includes work that is posted online such as in a blog. Work that cannot be identifiable to a student can be posted for public consumption. (Baskin &Surratt 2001) There is little case law involving FERPA and student blogs. However, the legaldepartments of several universities have produced guidelines for their faculty. TheUniversity of North Carolina's published guidelines state that students may create and maintain blogs in a classroom setting if the blogs are only viewable to fellow classmembers and the instructor makes no evaluative statements in the blog. (Drooze, 2007)Despite this "loophole" it would appear that prudence would dictate that parental consentbe collected before an elementary or primary school educator starts blogging in his or herclassroom. ClassChatter and ClassChatterLive also provide several tools to help you meet FERPA compliance. In fact you do not need to sacrifice collaboration to meet FERPA. Our unique "identity masking" feature allows students to hold online discussions while keeping their identities a secret, yet still allowing teachers easy access to their 'unmasked' identity. ClassChatter and ClassChatterLive also let you precisely control how much access students have to each others work throughout the site. Furthermore, with Assignment Blogs, teachers and students have an area to privately and securely post, answer and grade assignments. http://www.classchatterlive.com/page/d4451e5f0184589986b99bd07abd45b6 http://www.classchatterlive.com/page/d4451e5f0184589986b99bd07abd45b6 Mon, 09 Mar 2009 08:36:07 PDT I hope you are weathering the winter well and avoiding those lingering colds. This week I havereleaseda number of new features to ClassChatter and ClassChatterLive. The mostsignificantnew feature is most likely the ability tocompletelyshut off Personal Blogs in both ClassChatter and ClassChatterLive. For those of you who use ClassChatter mainly with the assignment feature, or who are using it with younger students who need fewer options this option is what you have been waiting for. For ClassChatterLive users I have made a number of small enhancements. Your students will most likely notice theimprovedinterface for answering assignments. And both teachers and students should enjoy the ability to compose and edit most posts in a HUGE new content editor. I hope this helps you make more beautiful blog posts and makes your work moreefficientthen ever! http://www.classchatterlive.com/page/793eacd9bf543b062633e8113b6ff875 http://www.classchatterlive.com/page/793eacd9bf543b062633e8113b6ff875 Mon, 02 Mar 2009 19:41:42 PST Today thanks to user feedback we have implemented several user interface and formatingimprovements. There is now a direct link to the class homepage from the students side of the website. We have also added a formating option to our text editor. Students and teachers can now make adjustments to the font size of posts. Finally, we have added a "printable format" button for personal blogs in ClassChatterLive. We are currently working on adding a printable version to topic and other blogs. Please keep those suggestionscoming! http://www.classchatterlive.com/page/b7d25df31eaa5b70bd0110fd4628d126 http://www.classchatterlive.com/page/b7d25df31eaa5b70bd0110fd4628d126 Tue, 24 Feb 2009 17:53:34 PST You most likely have noticed new notifications that throughout ClassChatter highlighting some of the features of ClassChatterLive our new premium service. I am writing to explain a little about ClassChatterLive and answer some questions about the ads. ClassChatterLive is a premium suite of online tools for educators. It includes advanced blogging, podcasts, electronic dropboxes, online imagegalleriesand many more features. For many users ClassChatterLive can provide a complete courseware solution. ClassChatterLive grew out of ClassChatter. ClassChatter originally started out as a very basic password protected blogging site. As it grew over the years we have added more and more coursemanagementfeatures, as well as a few features thatstretchedthe meaning of the word blog. Unfortunately, the feature list of ClassChatter became limited due to the fee and advertising free nature of the site. ClassChatterLive was born to provide a place for ClassChatter to expand to its full potential. This is not intended to be a high cost site. In fact a yearssubscriptionfor a school can be purchased for only $150. Thats less then $1 per school day, and that price includes all students and teachers in the school --- no hidden fees. This also does not mean that ClassChatter is going away or willbeginto charge a fee. ClassChatter will remain free and remains under active development. If you choose to upgrade one day all of your classes, students, assignments, and blogs are instantly transported to the new site. I hope this clears some things up and thank you for your interest in ClassChatter! http://www.classchatterlive.com/page/3e388e2bc315758fe7e8a8e6bf81d1a7 http://www.classchatterlive.com/page/3e388e2bc315758fe7e8a8e6bf81d1a7 Fri, 13 Feb 2009 12:15:50 PST Recently, since our server upgrade early Sunday morning some users have beenexperiencingdifficulties creating certain postings in ClassChatter.com. I believe that I have tracked down the source of these issues. Everything should be functioning as normal now, however if you run into anydifficultiesplease be sure contact us using the forms on our main page. http://www.classchatterlive.com/page/f256422447837bfbafdab920c0c7acd4 http://www.classchatterlive.com/page/f256422447837bfbafdab920c0c7acd4 Tue, 10 Feb 2009 14:09:46 PST Around Midnight EST onFebruary7th ClassChatter.com and ClassChatterLive will go offline for a major server upgrade. ClassChatter.com and ClassChatterLive may be unavailable for up to 12 hours. While Iapologizefor this extended outage, once we are back oniine you can expect a faster site with almost zero downtime. ClassChatter realizes how important its that your educational tools are ready to use when you and your class need them. We arecontinuallyworking to provide you with an ever improving userexperience. http://www.classchatterlive.com/page/bffb3e7813d9abcb403ed7d2654be094 http://www.classchatterlive.com/page/bffb3e7813d9abcb403ed7d2654be094 Wed, 04 Feb 2009 17:53:16 PST