ideas
Building a Course Blog
There are several ways to integrate blogs into your course design. Here are a few suggestions.
An Instructor Based Course Blog
An instructor blog is the most straightforward way to use a blog. It functions much like a lecture style course where the instructor dictates the topics and subjects with each post and the students read the post and provide comments.
Using the instructor blog as a means to extend a lesson outside the classroom will also provide students with a study tool come test time thanks to the automatic archive and search functions. Students will be able to search your posts to prepare for tests or to assist them with a research topic.
This blog is relatively simple to maintain. However, if you intend to have a blog for each of your courses it can get cumbersome. There are a couple ways to tackle this issue. One way to address the issue is to create a different blog for each course. While this is easy to get started, maintaining multiple blogs can be taxing.
Another way to address this issues is to employ the built in category feature in your blog. By creating a category for each course you are teaching you can write to the smae blog but mark your posts with the specific course category they are intended for. By employing this method you can maintain several course blogs through a single blog.
Individual Student Blogs
While the instructor blog forces students to visit a single location, the student blogs force the instructor to read student posts on their blogs and provides comments.
While this scenario is effective for upper level courses with a smaller student population, it is unreasonable to expect a single instructor to view a dozen or more blogs.
A Group Blog for a Course
A group blog has multiple authors writing posts and writing comments. In this scenario each student and the instructor would all author to a single blog, with the instructor acting as a moderator. This scenario requires a separate blog be created with each student granted authoring rights.
Create a Course Subscription Page
Another way to setup a blog with multiple authors is to create a "Subscription." In this scenario there is no "new" blog to create and no permissions to set. An instructor creates an RSS link aggregator to feed blog posts from all of his or her students into a single location. Students and instructors create a course category in their personal blog, and mark a course post with the course category. So only posts for the course category are fed into the "Subscription" without any of their other posts. So students and instructors can keep their personal blogs but still posts to a course blog with a "Subscription."
Next - Set up a Subscription Page
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