Stephanie Sousa's Page

Hi Stephanie. I was wondering if you and your classmates would be interested in participating in a nationwide SAT Vocab Video Contest @ MIT university. You can view contest details at BrainyFlix.com Please let me know. Thanks!

I created the names for them. I used the first three letters of both their first and last names for privacy reasons. We often have a lot of custody issues in families so only initials are allowed. We are only allowed first names on our school web pages as well and pictures with parent permission.

Gaggle is a free email network for students. In order to participate on a Blogger Blog, the person must have a working email account. In Blogger, I set myself up as an administrator and the students up as authors. You have to send invitations for them to log-in the first time to the blog. I just did that step for them, because I didn't want them to have access to the actual email account. Does that help?

I went through a couple of channels to set these up for security reasons. I wasn't comfortable with my fourth graders having an email account at this age. While I know many have MySpace and other communication devices, I didn't feel like opening an another avenue. I did set them up with with a free Gaggle email account, but the students are not aware of the account. Then I went in Blogger and created a blog with each student from both classes as a contributor. I had to log-in as each one into their Gaggle accounts to accept the invitations and then they were good to go. Hope that helps. If you have any other questions, please let me know.