Last night, I walked Kelly through the steps required to make a post. In addition to that, I showed her how to link to another URL, add an image, and highlight text in a post. She took down a lot of notes and will write them all up after she gets all the rest of her homeschool work done. She is also going to try to do her first post here. The idea is that when she finishes, she will train Christian how to do a post. After having explained it once, she should be just fine. Christian is already so computer literate that he probably will not require much training. Christian will start working on the home page using Nvu if he is able to get all his homeschool work finished.
We discussed some of the topics it would be able to discuss on the blog and what kind of images it would be OK to put up. Because of the nature of the internet, we will not be putting up any actual pictures of the kids, we will not accept comments on the blog, I will preview their email before it gets to them, and we will take a few more security measures. We are working on a creative way to use cartoons or some stereotype images to give them a little bit of a public persona.
After I finished showing her how to do everything, Kelly asked if she could write on politics. I told her that because I would be vetting everything for content and quality as well as grading everything for homeschool, she could write anything she wanted. Our blog allows a writer to enter an entire post and then save it for future publication. That is exactly what we will be doing for all the kids posts. Kelly and Christian are both cartoonists and I will be having each of them do one cartoon per week that we will put up on the webset with an associated post on the blog.
We are planning to get a few additional bloggers for the website. There is another homeschool girl who is a member of our church that will probably have her own posting account and email. In addition, Kelly and Christian’s cousin Dayanita from Monterrey, Mexico will like have one, too. At least some of the posts will be in Spanish as both Kelly and Christian are bilingual and will have a reading audience in Northern Mexico.