General help

I too see the use of blogs as an activity having value. The option of making a blog private for teacher perusal only would be important.

This must be on a lot of minds. In this thread, I just posted about the Simple Blog (pre-1.6) which is an activity. I prefer it over the standard release blog function precisely because it is an activity and limited to a specific course.

I can only say "me too"! This Moodle docs page really expands on this topic and makes some valuable suggestions.

I got really excited by blogs when they were first announced, but the way they are currently implemented in Moodle means that I've disabled them, at least until a better solution comes along.

I suggest a blog assignment type that functions as follows:

Teacher:
Teacher creates a blog assignment, this puts a grade in the gradebook and provides an assignment link for students to see.

The teacher can configure options to allow a blog entry posted in the last X days to be used for the assignment.

Students:
When students enter the assignment they see a drop down menu of all their current (blog entries posted in the last X days as chosen by the teacher) blog entries, and they choose one to satisfy the assignment.

Assessment:
The teacher goes in, views the blogs that are linked from the assignment, leaves comments (the comments only show up to the student when they view the blog assignment), and gives a grade.

The blog entries themselves stay on the student's blog, only the grades, links, and comments go in the assignment (optionally the assignment scrapes the student's blog and loads the full text in to store for backup and restore).

Hey I like this idea, I'm posting it to the suggestions for the next Summer of Code.