WordPress MU seems really hard: Am I missing something?

I'm a tech coordinator at an elementary school in Texas. I was so happy in June when I got WordPress MU set up and running on my server. I figured now I would have a system that would make great looking, customizable blogs that would inspire students to write and would be easy enough for my teachers to manage.

But am I missing something? It doesn't seem quite ready for prime time. I'm the only one who has access to multiple blogs on one webpage. I set up another teacher as an administrator for her two children's blogs and she had to go one blog's management pages to check on posts and comments and then go to the other one's management pages to check for that one. That's fine if you're managing one or two, but is an average teacher going to be willing to go to all these pages to check 22 - 30?

Is there a plug-in I can install to make all of this easier? Or am I exaggerating how hard it really it is?

How do you manage a classroom/school of blogs with WordPress MU?

Tags: WordPress, blogging, blogs

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Permalink Reply by gordon brune on July 17, 2007 at 5:41am

Dean
I've shared these directions with teacher who want to set up a "student centered" learnerblog\edublog.
http://bruneti.wikispaces.com/learnerblogdirections

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Permalink Reply by Dean Mattson on July 17, 2007 at 5:30pm

Thanks, Gordon, that's an interesting way to go about it - to have everyone making entries on one blog and then having it categorized by their names. I may go that route in the end, but I'm going to play with giving every student their own blog which they can customize to a certain extent.

I did come across a WordPress plug in called Notify on Draft Post, which will email an administrator when a post is ready to be published. That's going to be helpful. Then I found out when you're in Firefox when you're in the admin pages, there's an arrow next to the blog's name in the upper left where you can toggle between the different blogs. That's very help.

I've also learned WordPress works much better with Firefox than Safari!

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Permalink Reply by gordon brune on July 19, 2007 at 7:44pm

I'll look into the "notify on draft post." That would let help me move towards having them have their own blog. As it is, I (and I would think most teachers) need to be very careful about moderation controls.

Using IE in the school so I'm stuck with that.

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Permalink Reply by Carolyn Foote on July 19, 2007 at 10:15pm

Teachers can also check the students work after they post using an aggregator like Pageflakes, which is so visual that it is a great place to subscribe to all the student blogs, so you can see them "at a glance".

Will Richardson suggested that in a workshop and I think it is a huge timesaver when you want individual students to be blogging.

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Permalink Reply by Dean Mattson on July 20, 2007 at 10:54am

Thank you so much for that suggestion. That's really great. It took me awhile to figure out how to add an RSS feed at a "flake," but once I got that it was very easy to set up. I was going to use Google Reader, but I think I like this better.

One thing though: Does it do anything to indicate that something new has been posted?

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Permalink Reply by Dean Mattson on July 24, 2007 at 8:53am

Here's another plugin I'm trying: GT Post Approval 0.3 Beta. When activated this requires an administrator to approve a post before it gets posted to a blog. However you can set it up so the new post does go to the RSS feed and you can see which blogs you have to check.