Blogging about products in food technology

Ann at DNI is a very inventive food technology teacher, she has some really innovative things going on in her classes including a Top Chef competition.

We went over a few video sites she might use for recipes and instructional videos. Teacher Tube, You Tube and Life on Video (video jug).

We also discussed using mash ups, which enable you to synchronize PowerPoint with video or audio. This would enable Ann's students to make their own instructional videos and recipes.

One thing that I was stuck on was how we would get all of Ann's students as authors on the class blogs we made. Each of her groups will have a blog which we linked to all of the class blogs. Ann will have her own blog also to share her learning with the class throughout her action research learning process, and she will be able to present this at the end of her research.
Usually to add people as authors of a blog with Blogger, you go to the settings area/ permissions and add the new authors email. The new author then goes through the link sent to them to become a member of the blog. Ann's students do not all have email addresses and I thought there must be a way for her to do this easily. I had a bit of a search around Blogger help and searched the help forum of past questions other had asked and found out how to add all students using just one email account.

You need a gmail account, these are free to set up and you would not need to use it past setting up the blogging accounts. If you already have a gmail email account then just use that.
Then in the settings/ permission area instead of putting the email as normal you write your email address and between your email name and the @ write +child's name.
For example dejmclean+bob@gmail.com (the blue part is not normally part of my email address). You can repeat this for each child in your class and all of these emails will come to your account. Each child will then have to join blogger by following the link but it saves you making email accounts for students that they wont use. This way one email account for every child in the class.

Although this is a neat time saving trick, I hope people also see how useful online help, espeically forums can be. Anytime you think 'I will I could do...' or 'It would be really handy if..', someone else has usually had the same thought or asked the same question and you probably can do it, it's just a matter of finding out how.