So glad this is helpful! Good luck moving forward!

This was very helpful as I am researching how to set up blogs. Our school board has reservations about our students blogging and this will help in presenting information to them. I have worked way to hard on creating a blog policy to stop now.

Good luck! Feel free to adapt the permission slip that I use, which is posted here: Learning to Blog: The Elementary Way.

Also, Edublogs has recently changed the way they handle the free accounts, so some of these steps might end up being a little bit different. Good luck!

Yes, moderation before posting is critical! We had a lot of success with the moderation – being able to go back and ask students to revise if grammar or writing quality was an issue. I would say the only “struggle” is making sure the posts are moderated quickly enough – once students want to post, they want to see it up on the blog right away. I like that we can emphasize the writing process and writing quality, while still giving the students the independence of their own log in and the ability to write when they feel the urge (not just during assigned writing time).

@missgrandjean,

Edublogs has since changed their services and now all blogs are hosted on an edublogs.org domain. But, when I was writing this post, I wanted to have the domain name reflect the fact that it was student authors, which is what learnerblogs was for (same company, different domain).

@notinio,

Yep, when I taught middle school all of my students had their own accounts. This was specifically set up for 3rd graders – most of whom don’t already have their own e-mail account.