Drafting Poems and Content

I always advise bloggers to create and save their poems in Word or some other word processing program. When you or students enter poems you merely have to copy and paste the poem from the word processor program. Also here may be times with there’s a glitch in the blog software or our database. Having ALL of your blog content on a school computer or server is a good backup idea.

Setting Up Categories for Your Poems

Some classrooms will want categories for their poems. Your blog homepage has an area for people to click on categories. If you want to to set up categories:

• Log into your blog
• Go to Write and select the Write Post tab.
• On the right side column find Categories
• Add as many Categories as you think you will need. You can add more later.
• As you publish poems, select the category that the poem fits.
• When people go to you blog, they can click on a specific category to view the poems within the category.

Process One: Students Enter Their Own Poems

Step One: Student Enters and Submits the Poem
Most teachers have students use their student login to post poetry on the blog. Keep in mind that students cannot publish poems directly to the blog. They can only save poems as drafts in the system or submit a poem for the teacher to review and publish.

Using this process:

• Students enter and save poems in word processor (i.e. Microsoft Word).
• Student logs in to blog system and then selects Write link and the Write Post tab.
• Student copy/pastes poem into the appropriate areas (Title and Post).
• Student makes any needed adjustments to poem (usually spacing will need adjusting)
• Student clicks on Submit for Review button. This sends the poem into an area for the teacher to approve.
• Student logs out of the system (very important for everyone to get into this habit.

Step Two: Teacher Review and Publishing of Poems

• Teacher logs in to the blog system and selects the Manage link and Posts tab.
• In the management window go to Status popup menu and select Pending Review and then click on the Filter button. This will select any poems that are awaiting your review.
• Click on Edit to view a poem needing action. The student’s poem will open for your review.
  Note that you may find it helpful to click on Preview to see what the poem will look like when published.
• Go to the bottom right of the page and find the Author popup. It will indicate a student user.
• Change the author to your name.
• Make sure that you have changed the author to your name. This is EXTREMELY important. This has no effect on how the poem will look when published. What the author change will do is prevent students from bypassing moderation when commenting. More on this later.
• You then have two choices:
• Save – this keeps the poem in review mode until you further revise, publish, or delete it. You may want to use this if you want to talk to student about making changes.
• Publish – this approves the poem and posts it to the blog for everyone to see. After the poem is publish you can always go back in and make changes.

Some Common Problems for Students

• Draft Posts – the Default Save Option (Not Recommended!)
  When students are working they often click Save when completing their work and is commonly how they operate in computer software. The Save button the default button and students tend to carelessly click this button. The Save option keeps the poem as a draft so that the student can come back later and edit. This can be a temptation for others using the student login to get in to someone else’s draft and make changes.
  Explanation: John enters his poem and clicks Save and leaves his computer. At this point any other student in your class can edit John’s post. I advise you to have students to enter poems by copy-paste from a word processing program so they are not caught having to save a poem because of time constraints. Teach students to use the Submit for Review button (explained below).
• Submit for Review – the Preferred Option
  After a student copy-pastes a poem, then s/he should ALWAYS hit the Submit for Review button. Once an entry is submitted it can no longer be edited by the student The exception is when you as the teacher deny the submission which will return the entry to draft status.

Process Two: Teacher Enters All Poems

Teachers that use this process typically open student poems from a shared folder and the copy/paste them into the blog. All that’s left to do after the copy/paste is to make adjustments to formatting (typically spacing) and then select Category and any other preferences. Click on Publish to post the poem to the blog.