Concerned About Blogging For ALL Students in 3rd-5th Grade...

So for this weeks assignment, I kind of talked briefly about my thought about blogs and focused on Edmodo, but we were to focus on discussing using a blog in our classroom.  Being an Elementary teacher- teaching all students in 3rd-5th grade, I feel a blog could be useful if used as a reflection tool or maybe a place for students to display their work, for example, their stories they type in MS Word so other students can read what they created and share their thoughts and give some tips.

However, I mentioned in my previous post that what I am hesitant about is not being able to keep an eye on outside posts especially with this age group, and they are still learning about internet safety.  Do any of you have any tips/suggestions on using a blog site for my age group?  My students also do not have an email address.  With Edomo they can create a username and password.  I guess that is why I really like Edmodo because I can lock the groups I create and I can monitor posts between the students. I think blogs would be great for older students and would probably work out if I only had one class to monitor, but seeing I have 15 classes (each with about 36 students from 3rd-5th), I feel like I would not be able to monitor as closely as I would like. What are your thoughts?  I do think blogging would be beneficial for us teachers at my school.  I think it would be a great way to share thoughts or discuss what we learned from our professional development meetings.