To Blog or Not to Blog

Blogging offers students with a chance to not only share their own artwork, but to comment on their peers work as well.

Questions that commonly arise are,

• "Is there away to monitor who posts comments on the student's blogs?"
  
• "Is there any harm in allowing the students the freedom to post comments on others class blogs?"
• "Can you control who sees the blogs"

Well here are some of my personal thoughts and experiences on these questions.

• Whenever a person posts a comment their user name shows up on the posting. If you are using the blog in a class setting, you as the teacher can ask the students for their administrator names and passwords when they set up their site. This way you can have access to the blog.
• In any situation in a class setting where you give students the opportunity to speak freely about each others work there is a chance something inappropriate or harmful can be said. The teacher needs to set the guidelines and expectations clearly ahead of time and make sure that they understand this is a class project with regular class consequences for bad behavior. They also will know that you have their user name and also their password so you can step in and remove any harmful posts.
• One of the great parts about using blogs and especially Blogger.com is that you have many privacy settings to work with. How I run the blog lesson is to have the class blog open to the public. This way you can share your blog with other educators, students and colleagues of any kind. The students individual blogs are setup in a way that the only people who can view their blog is by them inviting them through email. Once they receive the invite they have to accept the invitation and now are free to browse the blog. This means that the administrator of the blog has complete control over who can view it and at the same time, they know who is posting comments on it.