This is an important issue for many educators using blog technology in the classroom and revolves around the ability to protect and insulate the student's work from criticism - especially the destructive kind - before its released to the class or the school in general. As such the teacher needs the ability to review a students work and comment / advise before its published. This iterative process may require several cycles before the work is ready for prime time. While an editorial oversight process is pretty different from the way most blog software behaves, its crucially important for academic blogging applications.

So for Manila 9.6 we will provide the ability for a Managing Editor to moderate and approve material before its published to a wider audience. On a site with this feature enabled, all items the students create will be "pending" items. Pending items can only be seen and edited by the creator and the Managing Editor. To simplify the process of collecting and reviewing "pending" items, they will be collected for review on a single page by the site's Managing Editor (the teacher). The "pending items" page will list the author, department/category, date created, date last edited and by whom, a checkbox to delete the item, and a button to "publish" the item to the home page.

Clicking on the individual item's link in the Pending Items page allows the Managing Editor to edit the item or submit feedback. Any item on that site must be "approved" before it can be posted to the home page. This way the material on each students blog can be reviewed and "approved" prior to being published. We think this will be a great incentive to get more teachers comfortable with the idea of using blogs in the classroom for writing assignments and other class projects.

We should have a screenshot ready soon as well as a post with some more detail for the UserLand Blog.

From Scott Young's Radio Weblog