Given that students have access to the Internet, weblogs can easily replace traditional classroom uses of the private print journal. While weblogs are normally public, free tools such as Blogger can be used for private, expressive writing. Students need only choose “no” when Blogger asks if they want a public blog site, keep their site’s location on the web secret, and exchange the URL only with the teacher, resulting in a private electronic writing space where they can be free to express the personal.
Is this true? I thought it only kept your weblog from being published in the list of recently updated weblogs generated by blogger, but the moment you started linking to others and they linked back to you, your private blog would be public? Does anybody know?
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5 comments:
That's no problem at all. In Blogger .com, you can choose to publish the blog to your own domain or homepage. If you have your own domain (on a webhotel or your own server), you can password-protect the folder, and it will be more or less a private blog.
Yes, that is an option, but then you have to have your own domain, and password protect it. This indicates that the teacher needs to get a domain, put all student weblogs on it, and give them all passwords, quite a bit more than just clicking "no" when blogger asks if you want a public or a private blog.
If you chose "no" when Blogger wants to know if you want it listed - the blog is still reachable by anyone who happends to click somebody's "Next blog" button.
When you click 'no' to a public blog, it stops it from being added to the public blog lists at blogger.com and stops it from coming up in search engine results, I think.
The only way I have found to maintain a private blog with blogger.com is to remember to select 'draft' rather than 'publish post' when you save your posts.
Perhaps the students might find one of the more diary-like blog sites (livejournal.com, and so on) better for personal writing that you can keep private; or at least open to friends (if the teacher is on their "friends' list", if the blog has that function).
- adam
Thanks thomas and adam, that's pretty much my impression as well. And if you choose the "draft" option, you can't share with your friends.
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