Managing Multiple Blogs

So in searching for help on managing multiple blogs, I came across this article from The Chronicle of Higher Education (which is a great paper, by the way, and the ProfHacker column is always good).

http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/tools-for-managing-multiple-class-blogs/22893

What is even more helpful than the article, though, are the comments below. One mentions a blogging rubric, which I will probably work with and customize for my class. It's from a blog called "Sample Reality: Pedagogy and the Class Blog":

Also, the comments discuss Word Press blogs and the "semi-private" setting which allows only the instructor to read student posts. So I poked around and found that in Blogger, those choices are under Settings-->Permissions. This would take care of some of the privacy issues if that is a concern.

My concern, as always, is time. If I have students using blogs, I have to read them all, which means I should make some adjustments that week about posting in their discussion forums. I am getting used to Google's "reader" but it still seems very crowded to me and I'm afraid I will miss things. I am, however, really interested in seeing whether the blogs are a useful tool for students to track their own progress.

I could use the "team blog" option, but I don't think that would give me the results I want at this point, but it does give me some good ideas for my more advanced classes. I can allow students just to post and not have administrative control, although I would also probably allow them to have their own blogs too, if they wished. One of the great things about technology in the classroom is the freedom it gives students to "co-create" learning experiences and to help others learn. Restricting them only to a team blog seems to fly int he face of that, although if we worked on it as a class project it might really be fun.

So, in the end, I suppose my current, very tentative management plan is to have specific required posts on the blogs (thought they will be free to blog more often). I will have a rubric for grading those posts up at the beginning of the term. In addition, I will set up two separate email accounts in Google so that I can separate the blog readers. (My school signs up thirty student in composition and usually about 10 drop by the fourth week, so we're talking approximately twenty blogs per class).