This post discusses setting up Blogger for your school domain and the issues you should take into consideration to make it easier to use Blogger with Teacher Dashboard and to reduce your ongoing management effort.
If you have not seen it already, the Pt. England School in Auckland NZ put together a great resource site with loads of advice and policies they’ve used to manage their 500+ blogs over the last few years. This is a must-read.
Using Teacher Dashboard Blogger views
Teacher Dashboard presents two views into student blogs: a Posts view and a Comments view.
Posts view
The Posts view shown above displays the most recent posts in each student blog, showing the post title, status indicator (Draft), the author of the post, and the time elapsed since last update.
Clicking on the post title opens the blog and the post in a new window. Moving the mouse over the title link displays a popup with the content of the post, including images, videos, etc.
The Posts view makes it easy for the teacher to very quickly scan the student Blogger work.
Comments view
The Comments view displays the most recent comments left on each student’s blog, and shows the comment title, the ID of the post the comment was made on, the author, and time elapsed since the comment was made. Clicking on the comment title opens a popup window with the post / comments open. Moving the mouse over the comment title link displays a popup with the full text of the comment.
The Comments view makes it easy to quickly ascertain who is commenting on student blogs, whose blogs have not had comments in a while, and how students react to the comments left for them (i.e. are these conversation starters, etc.)
Setting up student blogs for use with Teacher Dashboard
For the moment, student blogs need to be set up manually; Google is working on this and we expect this will change in the near future.
There are a few (very important) things to keep in mind when setting up student blogs:
Always, always, always:
- create the blogs using an institutional domain account (school.apps.owner account created for Teacher Dashboard)
- use a consistent naming strategy along with a URL prefix that distinguishes between your student blogs vs. class blogs for example.
The recommended naming strategy is: schoolprefix-blogtype-partialstudentemail, resulting in URL’s like “pte-sb-anne9fkj1″. Partial student email address can be the address except the last few characters (before the @) to ensure the blog URL’s are unique but not expose the student’s email address to the public - give teachers admin rights but make absolutely certain they have a demonstrated understanding of Blogger basics, particularly blog monitoring and moderation
- give students author rights only
Teacher Dashboard assumes that each student portfolio blog is shared with one and only one student as author.
The student blog URL prefix (“pte-sb-” from above example) needs to be added to the Classes spreadsheet, in a “Student Blogs” column, for any class whose teacher should see the student blog in their Teacher Dashboard (i.e. generally for all classes). Once the spreadsheet is updated, reload it using Teacher Dashboard Console – owing to caching there may be a 15 to 30 minute delay in the blog views appearing on the Dashboard.
If the student blogs are already in place and no naming convention is in place, the value of “any” can be put in the “Student Blogs” spreadsheet column to allow Teacher Dashboard to simply display the first blog it finds author rights to for each student.