Hi Sharlyn,
There are some great third party modules that many have used for their publishing platforms.  Ventrian News Articles, Engage: Publish and ZLDNN DNNArticle are three that you may want to investigate.  However, I believe you can achieve what you've described above with the DNN Blog module.

When you install the blog module, there are 5 sub modules that are installed in the page by default:  View Blog, Blog List, New Blog, Search Blog and Blog Archive.  Once you've configured a blog for a teacher (actually, they have to create the blog or you have to log in as them and create the blog), you can install the View Blog to a separate page by adding the blog module and then deleting the other sub modules that you don't need.  Once the View Blog sub module is in place, you can go to the Module Options page and configure the Personal Blog Page so that it points to the user's blog.  This can all be configured on a new page added for a specific teacher.  After you save your settings in the Module Options page, the module will now show a list of entries made to this particular blog.

In addition (and I think possibly in answer to #2), you can specify in the Blog Settings for a blog that a blog is not public.  If a blog is not public, then it won't appear in the list of blogs on the site.  However, the View Blog module can be added to individual pages as noted above and these tabs can be secured using the normal DNN role based security.

What do you think?  Does it sound like that will work for you?

Finally, I should mention for others reading this post that it may be worth it to hire a company to help your organization with the process of adding community publishing to your current web platform.  The information that will accrue in these new information stores will become a central part of your overall information architecture over the coming years and the choices you are making right now will have consequences down the road.  If this rings true for your organization, then it's worth it to spend a little time up front asking the stakeholders in your organization some questions about how configuring a blogging solution fits in with the overall web strategy for the organization.  Here are some questions I would encourage asking:

1. Will content need to be categorized?  And if so, will it be important for content providers to share a set of categories defined for the organization?

2. Do I want to allow users and/or content providers to be able to tag to content?  If so, should the tagging solution be implemented site wide or should we encourage content providers to use the tagging infrastructure of services like Technorati, which can increase the Social Media Optimization (SMO) of the organization's site?

3. Will site visitors be allowed to enter comments and if so, will this process be moderated?

4. Will it be important for the organization to have some kind of workflow in place to ensure that content is approved before being posted on each of the blogs.  This can be an important step in ensuring that the organization as a whole isn't liable for inappropriate or sensitive material being posted by content providers who aren't aware of the policies or reach of the content which they are posting.

5. Will users need to be able to connect using offline clients like Windows Live Writer? 

6. Will the publishing platform need to support attachments?

7. Will an effective search strategy be important for content that is added to the site through the publishing platform?  Will enterprise search features, such as categories, support for logical operators, synonyms and taxonomies be important for our end users?

Depending on the answers to some of these questions, the DNN blog module may not be the best choice for an organization. And depending on the size of your organization and the overall complexity of your publishing needs, the size of this kind of project may range from something your staff can manage over the process of a few weeks to a full-blown initiative complete with multiple projects broken out into distinct phases and implemented over a series of months or years.

While I am pleased when the DNN blog module fits an organization’s needs, I realize that this isn’t always the case and as I have consulted with organizations regarding their overall strategy for adding blogs to their web properties I have found that in most cases it’s better for the organization to go with a commercial product that supports the full range of features we have determined will best meet their needs. 

The current downside to the DNN blog module is that it doesn’t natively support the following common needs: approval workflow, keywords, hierarchical categories and true multi-author support on a single blog. 

These are all features that the team is looking to add to the blog module in future versions, but this takes time and when these features are a must have for a solution that’s being designed now, I find that it’s better to go with a commercial product that has the required features and is both stable and mature.

HTH,

Don