Oct 22 2008
Blogs…choices, choices
I am writing this post in the hopes that other educational bloggers out there will add to a discussion in order to provide information for people who are thinking about getting into blogging with their classes about which provider to sign on with.
We (obviously) use Edublogs. Edublogs has just undergone a massive makeover. Last week was quite rocky. The service was up and down while they worked out the bugs. They are very good at communicating when they will do work but I think they were a bit blind sided by how much work the makeover would be. If you had asked me early last week about Edublogs I would have told you to avoid it like the plague but this week the sun is shining again.
I find it very easy to manage the blog and have actually abandoned my website and now just use the blog. Setting up student accounts is getting easier and I like how I can post from any computer anywhere – unlike my website. It means that I can post daily and my students are doing some of their writing from home.
I also like the fact that edublogs is a free service that is advertising free. I don’t like sending my families or students to sites that post commercials.
Another plus is that it is really easy to upload pictures and video to the site. Nathan has provided a video tutorial on how to upload a google calendar to the site. I am interested in coding and the background mumbo jumbo on how these things work so I appreciate how easy it is to manage and modify the blog.
I look forward to seeing comments about other blog providers. If you would like to see my classroom blog please visit 56j.ca
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Edublogs is certainly not the only option. In our case, it was the one that we grew familiar with and understood fairly quickly. When it works, it’s really good. When it doesn’t work it can be really frustrating!
Jane is right, there is no advertising in it, unless you get to the site by searching for it in a search engine like Google. Find a discussion about this at http://portablepd.edublogs.org/2008/06/22/ads-and-edublogs/
Scott Macklin, a teacher at Century Public School has had success with Wordpress.com. Wordpress, interesting enough, is the software that Edublogs runs on as well.
Scott says, “We decided not to use edublogs this year. I found that they were a bit slow navigating between the pages when doing edits and uploading. No podcast stuff yet, but our first should be posted next week.”
Find his class blog/podcast at:
http://centuryroom23.wordpress.com/
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