Are blogs safe for classroom use?

   Many people today are worried about their child's safety online. Sometimes the thought of having your child blog can be one that makes yourself stop and ask, "How safe is this?". There are actually many safe ways to use blogs for education.
   First of all, to use a blog you set up a username, which for safety's sake, is not your own name. This helps protect the child's identity and makes it where no one reading or posting on the blog, besides the teacher, will know who that child is. For example, a teacher could have each child pick an animal for their username, so if a child's name is Sarah but her username was Kangaroo1, all you would see when she posted was Kangaroo1.
   Another way that blogs have been made safe is that there are some websites that offer secure blogs that only the teacher and students can see. That way no one else on the internet can look, only the students post and only the teacher and students can read it. One site that offers this for free is http://www.classchatter.com/.
  Even if you do use a blogging site such as blogger.com there are ways to make it only accessible to the people you want to see it. By opening an account wtih blogger and then clicking on "Settings" and then clicking on "Permissions" you can change it to where only the people you choose and look at the blog. So a teacher could make it where only her students, herself, and the parents could look at the blog.
  Another way a teacher can make internet and blog use safe for his/her students is to talk about internet safety in the classroom. This is not only an important skill the students need to know for internet use at school, but also for use of the computer at home. The following is a great article by KidsHealth about internet safety for children: http://kidshealth.org/parent/positive/family/net_safety.html#
  Blogs can be a great educational tool as long as teachers make sure there students use them in a safe way. Well, this ends my posting on Blogs so I hope that my research was of help to anyone who is attempting to use a blog in their classroom. Thank you!