Blog, Website, or Both?

     Our school year begins in less than two months and I am spending this summer trying to get as organized as possible. In addition to the million-and-one things that are required of teachers, I know that I want to have my students blogging as well as have a classroom website.

     I have two science classes, Grade 7 & Grade 8, who I want to start blogging projects with. These are two of my smaller classes as I am nervous that I will get too overwhelmed if I tried to get ALL 7 of my different subject-area classes blogging. Depending on how the project goes, in regards to student benefit, I hope to increase this in the future. My hope is to have 1 blog for this project (Grade 7 & 8 can tag their posts appropriately) where students can:
– Share what they learned on specific days
– Create a student-created textbook for the course
– Host various assignments
– Ask questions/develop project ideas
– Connect with other students, various people in the science field, etc

     As I mentioned, however, I have 7 different classes ranging from Grade 7-Grade 10 and I would also like to have a classroom website where all students (and parents) can go to in order to find various information. A classroom website would, theoretically, hold information like:
– Parent portal link (so parents can check marks)
– Classroom/school policies
– Individual classroom pages
– School calendar
– Contact information
– Copy of the school calendar
– Homework/important project info
– About me page

     Now the question is, do I create these two separately or do I put them together on one big page? For example, if I used Blogger would I have the Grade 7-8 blog as the focus and then have tabbed pages serving as the classroom website? I could also use Weebly, which creates amazing websites and would be perfect for the classroom website, but doesn’t have the best blogging network. I could have them on completely different platforms and just link them to each other.