Intuitive, student-friendly platform for sophisticated-looking blogs and websites
Community Review for WordPress.com
My Take
If you are looking for a user-friendly place for students to blog, Wordpress.com is a great option. It's not as customizable as the paid site (Wordpress.org), or other custom domains, but if you need basic functions and lots of plugin options, Wordpress.com has more than enough features. Plus, it's so easy and quick to set up, you can test it out on your own (or model the set-up live for your students).
How I Use It
I use Wordpress as a host platform for student blogs/websites and whole-class blogs.
What Worked - It was a quick, easy way for students to set up professional-looking, personalized blogs to house their writing and reflections. The free version site supports multimedia files and is fairly easy for students to learn.
What Could Be Better - Sometimes, students had trouble with more sophisticated features (e.g., tagging), accidentally left stock content on their site (e.g., "This is where your first post will appear."), or had trouble sharing the direct link to their posts (vs. the link to the entire site). Free themes have limited customization.
You can see an example at (https://seniorenglishseminar.wordpress.com/), which was our whole-class blog that links to students' individual blogs.