We are deploying a new functionality on the Commons called Broadcast. The Broadcast box at the bottom right of the post edit page will allow you to take a post and cross-post/duplicate/broadcast the post to another blog.
Historically we have always felt that students should have one main blog, on which the post all of their work. We recognize that classrooms and initiatives set up group blogs for a variety of purposes, but we didn’t want students to have numerous blogs established for one grade or one course that would have one or two posts on them, and then would be abandoned, when one of the key features of blogging is the ongoing portfolio of work it provides for a student to look back on. We have attempted to endorse the idea that students could use categories to properly categorize their work, much like I do on my blog, with topics like technology, pedagogy, and the Commons. This is fine, but it can make it difficult — particularly in secondary (in elementary we find the teacher is usually responsible for multiple subjects and can just Follow the blog) — for a teacher to locate the posts a student has written for History, and Science, and English, if they are using the blog for multiple courses during the same semester.
Broadcast is our attempt to attend to this. If the English teacher creates a group blog for the course (using the Hub Sync functionality to add their students as Authors), then the students can broadcast their posts to that central blog using the new broadcast function. This provides a central location for students to see the work of their classmates. Currently comments left on the group blog sync to the student’s individual blog. The students can set it up so that the links on on the group blog will redirect back to the parent permalink (back to the student’s blog where the post was initially created.)
We are still crushing some bugs, but would love some classrooms to test out this functionality and either email me or comment below with feedback and commentary.
I’ve Broadcast this post over to my personal blog (so meta).