Need some advice on blogs

[Colin Bridgewater]

Our school is hosting a program called SHINE which will bring in 30 at-risk students from the greater London community on Saturdays for about 16 weeks for enrichment. Part of the plan is to have them do some hands-on interviewing, photography, podcasting, and blogging so that the content they create can be published, at the very least so that their own families can see the work they have done.

I have very little experience with blogs, and in the time that I've tried out Blogger and EduBlogs, I've really only confused myself about what the possibilities are. Since they are not students from our school, these kids don't have school email addresses.

I (think that) I'm looking for a solution where we might have one login that allows for multiple blogs (or pages within a blog). It would be good if viewers could be required to put in a password in order to view the blog entries. Blogger seems to offer this, but only if the owner registers (up to 100) email addresses as "viewers."

Does anyone have any wisdom they can offer about my possibilities?

Thanks,
Colin

[Linda Robinson]

We are an Open Text FirstClass school. FirstClass is a collaborative suite of tools which includes email. Everyone has blogging ability through a couple of different FC mechanisms - personal web publishing and open text social workplaces or "communities". All students have school FC email addresses. Podcasts are also a feature of web publishing. All are secured through passwords and IDs. Our parents have these to view their child's pages.
"Communities" can include outsiders that are invited by someone with that ability, therefore opening the closed system to "experts" and other collaborators as needed. We have one "community" with 50 students from Israel who have blogging ability without our school address or other functionality of a full client. But they can also create and upload documents, images, video, podcasts, wikis, etc.