Two websites that offer free blogs are blogger.com and wordpress.com. There are other sites as well, including blog options in MySpace, Facebook, etc., but I think either of the two I mentioned would work well (and probably better than those integrated into social networking sites). I'm pretty sure that both have privacy options which students could use to set the blog to not be publicly displayed, though you might need to walk some students through the setup. One thing to consider is whether you (or the students) want their entries to be viewable by only you, you and fellow students, or everyone. Setting them up as private between only you and the student or available to everyone would probably be easier than setting them up for the in between of just the class because of the account setup and access control configurations. Also, I believe these sites have an option to have posts appear on a given date, so the entries can be written before they appear on the site. Of course, this is also something that students would have to setup for each post. I'm not sure if you'd be able to see it before it appeared, but that might not be an issue. You could also use a feed reader (like reader.google.com) to subscribe to the RSS feeds for each of the student blogs so you would know when students had posted a new entry, rather than having to go and visit each one individually. There are definitely some possibilities here, and I've been thinking of doing something similar as part of my methods course for ongoing discussion of research articles but haven't decided if I'm going to do it this coming semester or not.
Of course, another option depending on resources would be a blog site hosted on a university server running something like Wordpress MU. This would likely give you more control over access to the blogs and some other issues that might come from using an outside blog hosting service, but it would take having someone to set the system up and maintain it. So, unless you have the know-how and time to committ to supporting it this way, a site like blogger.com or wordpress.com might be s better option. Hope this helps - Marc ======================================== G. Marc Turner, MEd, PhD Senior Lecturer & Technology Coordinator Department of Psychology Texas State University-San Marcos San Marcos, TX 78666 Phone: (512) 245-2526 E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----Original Message----- From: Traci Giuliano [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [tips] using blogs as an alternative to journals (a) what program/website to use, (b) whether to make the blogs public or private (if that's possible), and/or whether to give students a choice, (c) how to assign points to student entries (e.g., are students required to make comments on other students' blogs? how is quality graded?), and (d) is there a way to make the blogs accessible at the same time so that students don't see other students' entries until the deadline (e.g., so they aren't unintentionally primed to write something similar)? --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
