Overview
The Blog tool in D2L Brightspace is going away as of August 11, 2026. As an alternative to the Blog tool, we recommend using Discussions or Assignments. Discussion topics or Assignment folders can be tied to the grade book and both provide notification options from D2L Brightspace.
Alternatives to the Blog tool
- Did you use the blog tool for students to journal? Why not create a one-on-one group discussion with each student to provide them with a space for threaded entries? Only you and your student can access their one-on-one discussion.
- If a threaded conversation is not necessary, consider setting up an assignment, where a student can submit writing or media and receive feedback from an instructor.
- Was the Blog tool used as an assignment for the student to experience professional blogging? Let's try an open discussion topic to allow students to post entries in a threaded manner and reply to comment on each other's threads. You and all your students can access all student threads in the discussion.
Notification options for student activity
Instructors can be notified when students have posted to the discussion or submitted to the assignment.
- By default, when starting a new thread in discussions, you are subscribed to the thread. This means you should receive a minibar alert in D2L Brightspace and often an email from D2L Brightspace when someone else replies to your thread in the discussion. This helps keep track of updates to the discussion and communicate more efficiently with your students. Learn more about post and reply to discussions as well as subscribing to email notifications.
- And when using an assignment, you can be notified of new and resubmitted assignment submissions. Enter your email address in the Notification Email field when creating or editing an assignment to be notified.
What about assessing student entries?
With the Blog tool, we did not have a method to connect the Blog entries to the grade book. Using the Discussions or Assignments tools, you can tie the activity to the grade book! When assessing the student's work, the score and feedback can be transferred to Grades. Learn more about configuring a discussion topic for assessment or evaluating a student's submission to an assignment.