The Dangers of Blogging in the Classroom

Blogging is rampant these days.  Emo adolescents are using blogs as a journals, cooks are using blogs to share their latest recipes, the wealthy are using them to share their travelling extravaganzas.  In the classroom, blogs are being used to.  Teachers are setting students up with their own blogs to share their writing assignments.  Blogs are a wonderful tool, but they can be prone to hacking.

Now if your class is a class of first or second graders you'll not likely have any trouble, but if you have a class of fourth graders, eighth graders, or 11th graders you may have a problem.  In today's world, the internet is the newest place for teasing, harassment, and torture.  If kids can get their hands on the blog of their victim they can do a lot of damage.

At the eZine Article, Computer Security in the Classroom - How to Lock Down Your Educational Blog, the author offers some simple solutions to preventing the hacking of your students (or your) blogs.  His suggestions are locking the blog's access solely to school computers, which, under your watchful eye, will deter a malicious student from attempting such a feat.  He recommend either locking the entire website or locking each blog individually, so that the blogs can not be edited on an outside computer.

In his article he provides clear, straight-forward directions on how to lock blogs through WordPress, the rival blogging website to this one.  For your convenience, I have reposted his directions for you here:

"How to lock down your (educational) blog's administration / login folder.
If you have a self-hosted WordPress blog, the following trick will prevent students from logging in (or hacking your website) at home. Note: You need to have access to the .htaccess file on your website. Our web host provides access to this file, however, apparently not all web hosts do.

1. Figure out the IP address of the computer that you want to use to access your blog. An IP address is your internet address online. There are various sites that will tell you your current IP address.
2. Use a text editor (i.e. notepad) to create a file named .htaccess and cut and paste the following lines of code into the file...
3. Replace 123.456.789.123 and 12.345.678 with your real IP address. Hint: If your Internet Service Provider gives you a range of IP addresses (For example 123.456.789.000 to 123.456.789.999), just drop the last octet number to allow a range. (For example, allow from 123.456.789)
4. Upload your .htaccess file to your blog's wp-admin folder. Now the only people who can access any file in the wp-admin folder must be using a computer with an IP address on your safe list (white list).Note: If you want to use the .htaccess file to limit access to your entire blog from specific computers, then you'll need to copy and paste the above code into the existing .htaccess file on your website's public folder (or wherever your WordPress blog files can be found). You must add the code into the existing .htaccess file instead of overwriting the file because WordPress has some important information in there already.

If the .htaccess file is modified correctly, whenever you try to login to your blog from an unauthorized computer, you should receive a 403 error." (http://ezinearticles.com/?Computer-Security-in-the-Classroom---How-to-Lock-Down-Your-Educational-Blog&id=1236658)

Remember, although we can lock things down and set up filters and firewalls galore, there is no substitute to talking to your students about the dangers of the internet.  Make sure they know proper "netiquette," and have a list of appropriate websites to visit.  Happy blogging!