I’ve used most of those that you have mentioned and I think it depends on a couple of things.

1. What’s unblocked at your school? That’s the first question to answer…that by itself can narrow down the choices for you.

2. How “open” are your blogs going to be? Blogger and edublogs are both open platforms meaning they are open to anyone in the world commenting on your students work. If that’s what you want…those are the best blogging platforms….as of easy of use….blogger is easier, edublog gives you more options.

3. If you want a closed system classblogmeister is a good one. Even though you can open it to the world, it’s a great system if you need to keep your student blogs protected. It doesn’t allow all the customization as blogger or edublogs which for Middle School and High School students is very important, but it’s a nice simple blogging platform.

So, now that I’ve completely confused you here’s my recommendations:

Edublogs/Wordpress: Love this for High School and Middle School students as it allows them to customize the look and feel of their site and make it personal which is very important to them and to the “buy in” process.

For elementary students who you want to take away some of those options, classblogmeister is a good choice…simple and easy to use with just a couple of themes to choose from.

Feel free to e-mail me if you want to brainstorm some more or need other ideas.

Teachers can just leave students a comment on their blog if the feedback is appropriate. If not it’s feedback they can give them in class. A blog in my eyes is a great portfolio platform. The use of categories to mange what you are reflecting about, the ability to upload pictures or work samples directly to the site….and if implemented across the whole school student continue to use the same blog year after year giving them years of data to pull from and reflect on their own learning.

Shanghai American School has been using them for a couple years. I encourage you to browse their blogs to see what students are producting.

Great stuff!

I began working with this years e-learning portfolios using google docs because it fit a multi-grade middle and high school unit I was doing on cloud computing. We migrated over to Google Ed. edition last year but our learning community was still getting acquainted with the various apps bundled in the package. It was a a nice way to get the kids on board with the new systems and we’ve bene using all year, updating them every quarter or so…
https://sites.google.com/a/iis.or.kr/iis-eportfolios/

We began blogging a bit later in the year… The way I see it blogs can be a part of a broader learning portfolio or visa-versa depending on scale and scope… As suggested, they could be rolled into one… However, a challenge for getting blogs going at our school was figuring out the best blog app for each grade level. Google Ed. edition does not come bundled with blogger -though I believe it should– so just simply jumping over to it was not an option –it required a bit more work. In the end I had grades 5, and 6 use blogger, and grades 7-12 go with wordpress:

http://iisblognation.wordpress.com/

Both of these projects (eports & blogs) are naturally, works in progress, and there are conspicuous differences between the younger and older students work but that’s something one would expect as they all grow into the process at their own speed….