Blog, forum or journal?

Today I got this email...

For this class, I have to create a website for an assignment, and am struggling with how to do this and not just be reinventing the wheel since we already do Moodle, Quia, Posterous...   I want it to be useful, and I've been wanting to do on-line journals for some time now. 

Can I pick your brains for ideas?  I'd like to do something interactive and get them writing a lot more in Spanish.   It would be my dream to have students keep on-line journals where they'd have to write 1x or 2x/week in Spanish responding to in-class topics and discussions.   It would be great if the students could decide if each entry would be private or public (but obviously I'd like to read them all).  I'm not sure if a blogger site would be the best option for this.  Do you know of any site where I could, as a teacher, manage their journals? It would be sort of a mix between a forum and a blog. I'd like for them to be able to log in and have all their journals on one page so they could see their progress, like a blog.  It would be great for me as a teacher to be able to see each student's entry to a particular discussion all on one page as well so I don't have to click on 70 different blogs to give them a grade. 


Here is my response, what would you have said?

Thanks for asking. First of all what a great idea to have a space where kids can share widely but also share with just you. I think that will allow kids who are not as confident in their voice to get started and make mistakes and eventually come out of their shell as Spanish writers and share with a wider audience. You can also share blog links with parents so they can keep up as well.

I have a couple of ideas. There is no perfect solution to your problem, just thinking off the top of my head. Posterous allows kids to have posts be private. If they would then invite you to be a contributor I think you can see the private posts as well. You can the either subscribe in Posterous and get an email whenever there is a new post, or add them to Google Reader and read them there (that is what I do with student blogs).

Everyone at school has a google apps account now. You could have them keep a journal in a google doc that they share with you. That would be completely private to the two of you. Then they could keep a separate blog (any blog software they like: we have had kids use our internal blog server, Posterous, Blogger, Shutterfly, and every student has a blog in moodle as well) where they would post pieces of the journal that they desire getting public comment on.

I would think about using our internal blog server as well. Everyone has a blog there by default, but for this we would create new ones with you and the student as a blogging group. Then posts could be marked private to the group only or public.

I have to admit the private/public nature of your request is a little different. Most teachers want either one or the other. From reading about the process of blogging by some of the people who have opened up about their work flow I think that the Google Docs option mimics most closely what bloggers do. They write many things for themselves and a few of them show up as public pieces that they actually post. To me this model make that option very attractive, but it would require following two different places that they post.

If you get any other ideas please tell me. Thanks for asking.