Having tried both blog service providers, I decided that for the purposes of the blogging initiative at SBP, we ought to use Blogger. That's not to say that I have not investigated other blog providers, including the recently-popular Tumblr (no, that's not misspelled). Therefore a few words about tumblr: yes, the provider allows for team blogs, but there are two hitches. First, the posts are not signed; it is not easy to see who has posted new content, unlike on blogger where the post is clearly marked with the contributor's name. (View the last line on this post.) Second, the premium templates and bells-and-whistles on tumblr (gadgets and themes/appearance) are for sale, i.e. they need to be purchased. Those fancy-looking tumblr pages have spent some money to look that way.
So why Blogger, and why not Wordpress? More about that after the jump.
I find that I am still a paper user. I need to put pen to paper when I'm organizing, brainstorming, when I'm thinking. It's also helpful so that I don't forget things. And despite having a laptop, an iTouch, a BlackBerry, and a Kindle, my thought process still requires me to use 'old-fashioned' paper and pen to get any writing going. That is, at least the structure of what I will write about needs, for me, to be on paper before I can type on the computer.
That said, here's what I like about Blogger. First, the dashboard is less complex than the Wordpress dashboard. If you don't have a Wordpress blog, you'll have to take my word for it that the dashboard on Blogger is more intuitive. Granted, there are more features that are available in Wordpress, and from its dashboard, but the complexity of the Wordpress dashboard will be too daunting for most novice users to understand.
Second, the accounts created at Blogger are linked/owned/created by Google. This means that the same username/email account can be used to access Google docs, which I wrote about in a previous post. Third, the Blogger dashboard organizes a user's blogs all in one place, unlike the Tumblr or the Wordpress dashboards which require the user to click and scroll to his other blogs.
Fourth, and most important, Blogger allows invitations to be sent easily. Recall that invitations need to be sent to potential contributors, i.e. to students, or more importantly to the students' email. Once the invitation is accepted by the student, he is added to the list of contributors, and his personal dashboard will have the blog listed. This is important for the student because he will potentially be a contributor to numerous class blogs. Once a student has a Blogger (therefore Google) account, he can see all the blogs to which he can contribute all listed in one place: the Blogger dashboard.
I have identified one drawback to Blogger, a feature that is useful but is only currently available in Wordpress. This feature is the one where the blog administrator (the teacher) has the ability to decide whether a post can be published or whether it ought to remain as a 'draft'. This feature is not available in Blogger: once a student contributor clicks on 'publish post', the writing is posted onto the blog immediately. The one recourse left to the teacher-blog administrator is to 'delete' the post, if that teacher determines that the posting is not appropriate, for whatever reason. I must remember to add this as a note in the 'teacher guide to blogging' that I am authoring for SBP.
Comment moderation is possible in Blogger, as it is on Wordpress (I didn't investigate this feature on Tumblr), although this may become unwieldy when 20 other students are commenting on their classmates' posts. That is potentially 20 x 20 = 400 comments that need to be 'moderated' (approved/disapproved) if the each student comments on all his classmates' posts. I may suggest that the teacher allow all comments, and then weed through these later on.
This week, my task is to create this "Teacher's Guide to Team Blogging at SBP" document. This will be quite a large task. I will keep you posted.
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