Moodle, Google Site, or....? What's the best way to manage a course?

Sorry everyone, I'm just brainstorming here since I can't make up my mind yet even though my fall term classes start tomorrow.


Last year I used a Moodle site for my fall Academic Reading and Writing for functions such as posting documents, discussion forums for students to exchange ideas, wikis, and tutorial sign up (Google Spreadsheet). I also have an interactive Moodle quiz for the readings we do.

That worked mostly well, so I could just fall back on using my Moodle site again. That would be the easiest option.

However, what I don't like about Moodle is that there is no student ownership of the content, like students would have with a blog. I want students interacting with each other, but I also want them to list their ideas, reflections, essay drafts etc. in a portfolio fashion so that they can have a set of ideas that they can "own" and keep in the future (I'm assuming students want to do this--I need to ask them a bit more explicity). They would also own the comments they get. In the future, they can decide whether to take the blog offline, expand it, show it to friends, graduate schools etc. So, I want to do student blogs.

So...what is the solution? Can I combine Moodle with a set of student blogs? Rather than using a forum, can I just post the assignment on Moodle, and then have students write on their blogs, and then click on each other's blogs and leave comments? Hmm...so I just need a page that has links to students blogs...but how will I know when students post an article or comments. For that, I guess I'll need to set up RSS feeds on Google Reader. Each student will have to do that as well if they want to know whether their classmates have posted something. Hmm...there are pros and cons. Can I set up a feed so that their postings are automatically posted on a Class Blog? That may be one solution to help students see all of the ideas that are flying around.

Also, Moodle wikis seem to have trouble, and sometimes I'll want all students to be able to collaborate on documents, so having a Google Group is needed so that I can share documents with the whole class as editors. I tried that a few terms ago and it went mostly well, though some students had trouble becoming Google Group members.

So...Moodle + Blogs + Google Group + RSS Feeds is the solution? Isn't there an easier way to do this?