class blog versus CMS
Community College English asks
I have a class blog which I use for all my classes. I post handouts, reminders, assignments, and occasional summaries of class activities for all my classes, using the entry title and categories to designate which class the entry is relevant to. I don’t use threaded discussions or a gradebook.
RRCC has a course management system, but I try to avoid it as much as possible for a few reasons. One, it goes down randomly and regularly, unlike the class blog, which hasn’t gone down once in the year I’ve used it. Two, the interface is clunky and takes too many clicks to accomplish tasks. Three, the CMS is password protected and I want my classroom materials to be publicly available.
The class blog allows me to do everything the CMS would allow except for threaded discussions and student-viewable gradebook. Threaded discussions or something like them actually can be done on a blog, but the CMS makes the threaded discussions easier to track. This past year, though, I’ve had students use their own blogs for the types of discussions I used to do as threaded discussions. The discussions aren’t threaded, but that doesn’t seem to matter for what I do.
I’m not a big fan of the student-viewable gradebook. In my experience, students want to be able to submit an assignment and have a grade instantly pop up in the online gradebook. For whatever reason, that expectation doesn’t seem to exist when there is no online gradebook.
blogarama
