I love blogging. It’s an excellent way to share your thoughts with others, to collaborate, to learn, to create… etc., etc.
My question is this: is there a platform that makes it easier for high school students to blog?
Let me explain why I’m asking this:
- When students are in elementary school, they generally have one teacher for the year. If the class is blogging, their teacher can open an account with Kidblog, Edublogs or another great platform. When students come to high school, they have about four different teachers per semester. If different teachers want to blog with the same student, does each individual teacher have to create an account so the same student can blog for each course?
- If a student wants to blog for each of their courses, is there a blog that offers this versatility? For example: a few of my students have been blogging for over a year. They had created their own blog through Google’s ‘Blogger’, and each new post for our class would show up on their site as the first thing that would be seen when visiting their site. When they tried to organize their blog by creating different pages or tabs to organize their work for different courses, they were disappointed that new posts couldn’t be made on each page.
If you have any suggestions or answers, please share!
Northern Art Teacher 
Good luck!
I don’t have an answer but would love to know what you find out.
In blogger have students use consistent labels on their blogs. In example at Apex if the project is made by Art Three students I label that post Art Three.
Have students create a new page but choose the web address option.
If you click the label at the bottom of a post it will create a URL. Here is my example using the art three label http://apexhsart.blogspot.com/search/label/art%20three
Paste the URL into the new page Web address option and then every time they create a new post using that label it will appear under that button.
The main blog will still have all posts but the pages will be separate.
Hope that makes sense and helps
It does make sense, thank you so much for your help! I’ll share this information with my students, and I know of a few who will really appreciate it.
Still hoping that there will be a company or platform that makes this process just a bit easier, especially if there are HS teachers who like to have privacy settings for their students.
I would say a Blogger or WordPress.com site is probably the best option for your students. If you use WordPress your students can use categories for different classes, with blogger I think they would have to use different tags.
Thanks, Wes. Does WordPress have options for teachers & classes, or is it fairly similar to Blogger (each student signs up individually & I link to their site)?
Hi Colleen
We have lots of schools, and school districts, where students use the same blog for their entire school life. If you know how to use a custom menu you can assign categories to posts and use a custom menu to send posts to different pages on the blog ( read more here – http://help.edublogs.org/2012/11/29/using-categories-to-organize-your-blog/ ). Or if you prefer not to use a custom menu then you assign the categories to posts and use the category widget in the sidebar.
On Edublogs Campus networks they can also use unique tags and categories to pull the posts from a student blogs onto a teacher’s blog so all the posts associated with a subject can be viewed on one location. They often set up a template blog that is used for creating all student blogs. The template blog is prepackaged with whatever posts, pages, widgets, categories, tags they want to appear on a student blog when it is first created.
Thanks
Sue Waters
Edublogs Support Manager
Sue, thank you for sharing that great resource. It really helps to have both instructions and pictures available in a handy reference. I think I have some experimenting ahead of me, as I get a bit more comfortable with categories, tags & labels, depending on the platform that my students will be working with.
I enjoy using edublogs with my students. Instead of the paper and pen journal entries I have them blog on various topics related to literary text we are reacing. Get some great stuff from them.
I had been using Wikispaces for K-12 but my co-teacher Paul Allison showed me YouthVoices.net and we do have some of our kids active on it with kids from all over the US. But lately, I’ve been obsessing at the power of Titanpad.com. It has a very raw text feel, so it’s probably best for collaborative draft writing in real time, but could conceivably used for much more because of it’s built in live chat function.
Hi Jake, I keep meaning to check out YouthVoices.net, but I haven’t heard of Titanpad.com before — I’ll definitely need to explore!