Tag Archives: Blog & User Creator

Step 7 – Setting Up Student blogs

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bloggingsetp7We’ve designed a series of nine steps, with how-to info, to help you with your class blogging.

This step is to set up student blogs.

Why have student blogs?

Class blogs are an excellent starting point.   But the most incredible outcomes are observed when students are progressed onto their own individual blogs.

Why?  Human nature!

As individuals we’re all driven by personal ownership; class blogs have less sense of ownership than an individual blog.

Here are my tips for creating your student blogs.

#1 Choosing Usernames and Blog URLs

Educators normally use the same name for both the student’s username and blog URL.  Keep them simple and easy for the student to remember.

Most use a combination of their student’s first name followed by numbers that might represent the year or class number.  For example, username misty09 and blog URL misty09.edublogs.org.

If you want the students to use the blog for their entire school then use a combination of letters and numbers that achieve this goal.

#2 Adding yourself to  your student blogs

Always add yourself as an administrator to your student blog.Image of student and teacher users

This means if you need to edit/delete a post, page or comment you can quickly access their blog from your blog dashboard. Image of navigiating blogs

#3 Moderating Comments

Educators either prefer to let their students moderate their own comments or they moderate all the comments for their students.  There are pros and cons to each approach.

If you want to moderate all comments, so comments are only posted once you have approved them, you need to create the blogs using the gmail+ method

You must use a real gmail account– educators either use their own gmail account or set up a gmail account for their class e.g. room13@gmail.com

For those comfortable with students moderating comments I recommend you subscribe to the comment feeds from your student blogs — here is how to subscribe to their comments using Google Reader.

#4 Assigning Student Role

You need to think about how much responsibility your students are given.  Do you want them to be able to write own posts/pages, change themes, add widget and approve comments or do you want (or need) to limit their level of responsibility?

Choose  your student’s user role on their blog based on your comfort level and the school or district guidelines.

Image of user menus based on their role

For those comfortable with students having a higher level of responsibility I recommend you subscribe to the post feeds from your student blogs — here is how to subscribe to their posts using Google Reader.

# 5 Creating the blogs

How you create the blogs depends on the type of Edublogs blog you have.

Here are instructions for creating student blogs using:

  1. The Signup page – free Edublogs blogs
  2. The Blog & User creator – Edublogs Supporters & Edublogs Campus only

Remember spam filters, especially strict ones for institutional email addresses, often block activation and password reset emails from Edublogs.org. If unsure use free webmail accounts such as gmail, hotmail that don’t block these invitation emails.

There are no limitations on the number of student blogs you can create!

And here’s where you find the other steps for setting up your class blog:

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Creating Student Accounts Using One Gmail Account

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Image of blog email addressWhen you set up blogs with multiple users the comment notifications are only sent to the email address that was used to set up the blog.

So if you’ve set up student blogs with your student’s email address using Edublogs Blog & User Creator feature comment notifications will be sent to your student. This is a problem if you wanted all comments sent to you for moderation.

While you can change the email address in blog settings (Settings > General) a simpler solution is to set up the student blogs using one Gmail account.

Using Gmail To Create Student Accounts

Gmail (or Google Mail) is Google’s free web email service with tons of storage space and lots of great features e.g. ability to easy search mail messages, threaded messages, built in chat.  Create your gmail account here.  I recommend choosing a name that people can identify easily as being you e.g. mine is my name with the s missing from the end of waters.

Educators can use one Gmail account to set up student blogs or sign up for different online services using gmail’s support of plus addressing. How this works is simple! Gmails ignores anything in the first half of an email address after a plus sign so if you create each email with the format username+studentname@gmail.com all emails will be sent to the inbox of username@gmail.com. You can use both text and numbers in the student names.

Image of using gmail to create blogs

FINAL THOUGHTS

Remember when using Edublogs Blog & User Creator feature to create student blogs the students are automatically added as Administrators (here is an explanation of the different roles you can assign users).  Also don’t forget to change selection to Yes in the Add Admin field if you wanted to add yourself as co administrator when creating the student blogs.

NOTE: to have access to the Edublogs Blog & User Creator for batch creating 15 blogs at a time you need to be an Edublogs supporter.

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What Are The Different Roles Of Users?

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When you set up an Edublogs blog with multiple users you have the ability to assign and control what other users can do in the blog depending on the tasks you want each user to be responsible for. You need to consider carefully what role you assign other users since Administrators are able to remove other users, including you, and editors can delete content.

The five roles a user can be assigned in decreasing level of responsibility are:

  1. Administrator – can do everything including complete power over posts, pages, plugins, comments, choice of themes, imports, settings, assign user roles and are even able to delete the blog.
  2. Editor – is able to publish posts/pages, manage posts/pages, upload files, moderate comments as well as manage other people’s posts/pages.
  3. Author – can upload files plus write and publish own posts.
  4. Contributor – can write own posts/pages but can’t publish them.
  5. Subscriber – can read comments and write comments.

The diagram below summaries the responsibilities of each role:

Image of user roles

Please note when using Edublogs Blog & User Creator feature:

  • Users are automatically added as Administrators.
  • To create multiple student blogs you add yourself as co-administrator by changing selection to Yes in the Add Admin field.

To be able to access Edublogs Blog & User Creator Feature you need to be an Edublogs supporter.

Image of adding co-admin

Changing User Role

You change the role of users in your blog dashboard by going to Users > Authors & Users.

Image of how to change user roles

FINAL THOUGHTS

Setting up blogs for your students? You may find these posts useful:

What role(s) do you assign the different users when setting up class and student blogs, and why?

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