Multiple Blogs for a class

[Tricky_Dicky]

Hi,

 

Our Head Teacher loves the ideas of blogging the pupils learning and has asked me to get it working. I'm looking at using Wordpress and was wondering what the best way of setting it up was. Ideally I would like to have a single blog for the class and then each child in that class have their own blog that only they can edit and post things to.

The front page of the class blog should contain a list of links down the left hand side to each child's blog, tags on the right hand side that pull through tag info from each of the blogs and the main part of the page is a feed with each posting from each blog being displayed.

 

Firstly, is this possible and secondly what would be the best way of doing it? Do I need a separate DB and install for each blog and then just do all the links manually?

 

Thanks

[Lippy]

Hi,

 

Our Head Teacher loves the ideas of blogging the pupils learning and has asked me to get it working. I'm looking at using Wordpress and was wondering what the best way of setting it up was. Ideally I would like to have a single blog for the class and then each child in that class have their own blog that only they can edit and post things to.

The front page of the class blog should contain a list of links down the left hand side to each child's blog, tags on the right hand side that pull through tag info from each of the blogs and the main part of the page is a feed with each posting from each blog being displayed.

 

Firstly, is this possible and secondly what would be the best way of doing it? Do I need a separate DB and install for each blog and then just do all the links manually?

 

Thanks

 

I have just been looking at blogging for our kids and ran into all sorts of problems with our LA blocking Wordpress. I think you'll find edugblog might be your answer here (pro version is about £40/yr but I think allows multiple managed blogs)

[SYNACK]

If you have Office 365 this is really easy.

[Tricky_Dicky]

If you have Office 365 this is really easy.

 

We do. Care to elaborate?

[synaesthesia]

I'd go for Wordpress, it's easy enough to set up. You can enable multiple sites, so perhaps a "site" for each class and the blogs contained therein. You can set up users for everyone, so the kids are editors to their own class or blogs, the teachers are admins for each site and you/head are admins for the whole shebang. Host it yourself and any worries about LA blocking anything are gone and you also have full easy control then should something go wrong.

[SYNACK]

We do. Care to elaborate?

 

With team sites you can easily add a blog and then use permissions to open it up to whoever, additionally the users personal site has a personal blog facility to. You can just add a bunch of blogs to a sharepoint team site or have them use their own and make a team site with a blog for each class. Again you get full control as an admin but assuming groups are setup you can delegate to the teachers, you still get templates and control on comments depending on your settings.

Edited March 31, 2014 by SYNACK

[Cache]

I meant to reply to this but forgot.

 

It's possible with Wordpress, I've just setup an internal webserver to do exactly this. I set up multiple blogs and made each one into a multisite blog which may not be the most efficient, but met the needs of what we wanted to do.

 

Students sign up for their own blog (restricted to the school email domain), so they are responsible for maintaining their own account. Teacher is set up as Superadmin on the blog site they manage for their class so they can access any sites that they need to should anything bad happen. There is also a nifty little plugin called "Multi-Site Site List Shortcode" - installing this and enabling it on the main site blog allows you to create a page with the shortcode [site-list] and then any sites created within the blog automatically get added to the page.

[seawolf]

Yes, Edublogs is an easy way to do this. It does have a cost though.

 

If you can use Office 365 as SYNACK suggested that would probably be your most integrated and cost effective solution.

 

If you have an OS X server around, you could also use Wiki Server to automatically create a blog (and wiki) for each student. Information and examples below. The advantage of Wiki Server is that it is quite simple and easy to use for the end-user. Not nearly as powerful as Wordpress/Edublogs, but also less complex. It also works very well with iOS and other mobile devices. And it's free if you already have an OS X server. If you don't, it can still be a pretty cost-effective blogging system for a school.

 

Examples:

Apple Wiki Server – a hidden gem? | eLearning and economics - digging a little deeper

https://dschool.stanford.edu/groups/

https://wiki.culver.k12.in.us/groups/

 

Setup instructions:

Use Wikis and WebDAV in OS X Mavericks Server | Krypted

 

If you have multiple domains, there are a couple of extra steps required:

OS X Server: Using the Profile Manager or Wiki service with Active Directory or third-party LDAP services