Honestly, Blogger is not my first choice for student blogging. I'm not talking about blogging through Google Apps for Education, but just the basic, every Google account gets one blog, with certain specific exceptions.
Blogger is an excellent blogging platform. Its strength in my opinion is it is a very flexible and customizable site. You can change about anything you want if you have perseverance, coding skills, or a friend that knows what to do. Really, it is a great platform for students that want to spend a lot of time customizing their spaces. That is also a real weakness when it comes to student blogs. In my experience with students blogging using Blogger, the students tended to spend much more time customizing than they did with writing posts.
Another weakness for student blogging comes when teachers need to moderate posts or comments. To do so, a teacher has to be the administrator of every student blog. This means you will have 20+ blogs to monitor and administer! Believe me, again from experience, this is a nightmare.
Of course the obvious way to get around having students blog on separate blogs is to set up one blog they can all contribute to. This was my preferred choice of student blogging until Kidblog came around. This is a good way of solving the problem, but this doesn't allow students their own space and it makes it difficult to manage those student posts you want to limit the views for.
So in conclusion, if you have older students who want to take ownership of their blogs then Blogger is a great choice. If you need some control I would suggest you look elsewhere.
Written September 14, 2014
After taking a year off and using the blogger account that comes with GAFE we are 100% back with Edublogs.
ReplyDeleteWould you be willing to write a review of Blogger or Edublogs (or both) for the site? I don't have any experience with using either with students.
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