WordPress has a couple of key features that may make it attractive as a blogging tool for your students. However, it also lacks several features that the Blackboard Blog tool has.
Advantages of WordPress over Blackboard
1. Customisation
WordPress has many options for customising backgrounds, header images, menus and overall look and feel. There are number of different themes students could apply to customise their site and make it feel more personal to them.
2. Visability
You have the option to make your wordpress blog visible to everyone. This is useful if your students are creating a portfolio and wish to promote and publicise their work. An example of an external facing student blog can be found here
3. Export Options
A common complaint about blackboard is that anything created by students within a blackboard course is lost to them when they graduate. WordPress allows you to easily export your entire blog, along with any documents/image etc which you can then import into a several other applications, including an external ‘free’ wordpress blog on wordpress.org
4. Transferable skills
Because wordpress is used so ubiquitously throughout the web, a working knowledge has been proven to be beneficial and looks good on any CV.
Advantages of Blackboard over WordPress
1. Support
Currently wordpress has little or no support from iSolutions, and although CITE can help you with your blog, support is still limited compared to Blackboard
2. Tutor Administration Options
The Blackboard Blog is managed by the academics and therefore they have full control over viewing the blogs. Its easy to create a blog for each student which can be private to the student, but still allows tutors access to it.
A student wordpress blog is ‘owned’ by the student, and therefore if staff want to be able to view the content, the student needs to enrol them. This could obviously lead to problems with those students who are not particularly IT literate.
3. Simplicity
Although wordpress has many more options for customising the look and feel and layout of a site, it is also far more complex. For those students simply wanting a simple blog, wordpress may be confusing for first time users.
In Conclusion
Both wordpress and blackboard has advantages and disadvantages. For a simple blog or weekly journal entry where the academic staff can view all students entries blackbaord is probably the best solution.
For those students who wish to be more adventurous and add some customisation and try something more adventurous wordpress may be the way to go.
For an informal chat about how you can use wordpress in your teaching please contact cite@soton.ac.uk
Posted By : Wordpress Admin