Yet another blogging post, it seems to be taking over at the moment but in a very good way. This week’s challenge was to see how children could get access to blog. I know Adam has been blogging, and that is fine for one child, but i want all of Year 5-6 to have the ability to blog eventually. So I needed to find a way of managing their accounts without adding them 1-by-1.

@hgjohn suggested using the Dagon importer tool. So I installed it and was blown away by the simplicity.

Firstly I needed a list of children, not a problem as we have CSV files of the children everywhere. I’ve used these to make logins for Purple Mash, our VLE and for J2E. I needed to give them all email addresses, but actually, these could be made up, so I made them up. I then gave them all ‘password’ as their password and copied this CSV, with all of it’s commas, into word. I replaced the commas with | as this is what the importer tool needed. I could then copy and paste these names into WordPress and set all of the children as contributors.

15minutes later and 240 children ( I decided to add Y3/4 while I was at it) now all have a simple login to their class blogs. As contributor they can write but not publish. Tomorrow I will start a trial with 1 very keen girl and hopefully our first children will be blogging by the end of the week.

You know what? This has all been hard work, but it’s well worth it. We showed our blogs to local pyramid heads today and they loved them too. So much so I am being shared amongst their schools to help set it all up for them.

Exciting times indeed…