After my first foray into school-wide blogging with an e-Pals site, I’ve determined that when you’re just making your own blog, the management doesn’t matter so much. When you go from three users to over 120 in a matter of hours, suddenly it becomes very important. Our BookBlog was a big hit – almost too big to manage. I immediately found that the management system was unwieldy – there was no way to get a single page report of my user names with real-life names without having to print off 10 separate web pages, and this was after only one sixth grade teacher had brought her students. I also found that comments could be either approved or rejected, but there was no good way to contact students to tell them why their comment was rejected. I want students to be able to search for specific tags or to tag their own entries, so that they have to think about what they are doing. A spell checker would be nice, too (very nice…trust me on this!!) Finally, the way that blog set up, all users automatically got their own blogs that were loosely summarized in the parent blog. What I really want is a blog that I and a few other administrators can control, with students able to respond to posts that we initiate. Hence the attempt at EduBlogs.
