Blogging
If you have been thinking of using a blog for your self as a teacher to share resources or to use with your students. Keep on reading here are some helpful tips and tricks that I have compiled for you!
I was trying out different blogging
tool to see what would be the easiest for teachers to use especially if
you have never blogged before. I set up my own account to see how easy
it would be to navigate, customize and figure out how to make posts so
that I could teach others how to do it. I don't mind winging it when I
am helping people but it is nice to know that I have seen the interface
before.
- retrieved from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/will-lion/2595497078/
Anyway, if you are brand new to blogging and are not planning on having your whole class blog with you, then I think
www.blogger.com
might be the vehicle for you. It is run by google so it integrates
seamlessly with googles other tools. Maybe I am impartial because I have
been using many of the google tools including Google Docs and Gogle
Apps for education. I have learned the interface and how works so it is
now second nature to me.
I continued my blogging journey and
noticed that when I read blogs and even website many of them used
wordpress. I really liked how completely different and how very
professional many of these blogs looked like so I set up a wordpress
account as well. When I googled wordpress I encountered 2 websites.
www.wordpress.org and
www.wordpress.com.
So what was the difference between the two? Easy... wordpress.com is a
quick set up, hosted by wordpress on their server and fairly easy to set
up, it is web-based, so therefor you can add posts to it as long as you
have access to the internet.
Wordpress.org was a little more complex,
you need to download the wordpress blogging application, install it on
your computer, find a webhost for your blog (costs money) then start
blogging. If you are friendly with the IT people at your school they
might allow you to host your blog on the school server.
I then turned my eyes to blogging tools used by teachers with their students and the first one I encountered was
edublogs.org Edublogs
was pretty easy to set up, the interface looked exactly like wordpress
so I suspect they are partners. I liked the fact that you as a teacher
can upgrade your account and for $3/month get 50 student accounts to
your classblog. $3 per month is not a lot of money but it is still money
for a teacher to shell out. Maybe they can get it paid for by the
school but with budget cuts and so forth I am not so sure about that.I
also looked at what controls the teacher had in form of monitoring
comments and monitoring who can access the blogs. Different schools have
different policies on displaying students work so I wanted to make sure
you could make it really secure. Edublogs fulfilled my requirements in
that arena.
Another blogging tool I looked at was
classbloggmeister.com a
blogging tool provided by David Warlick and the Landslide project. I
looked at that one mainly because my favorite Kindergarten Teacher Maria
Knee from Derfield, NH uses it to blog with her kids. I know it is
secure and allows for many controls. This is where I got a little
frustrated, I tried to sign up for an account but it keept asking me for
a school pass code and it did not give any further instructions. I
have now e-mailed David Warlick to see what my next step should be.
The final classroom blogging tool I looked at was
kidblog.org.
This application is very bare bones, but super easy to use. So for
those of you that just wants to have a forum for your students to blog
but don't care about it being flashy and fancy, this is the tool for
you! Here is a link to my friend Mr. Gagnon, he uses it with his 3rd
grade class! http://kidblog.org/mrgagnonsclass/
Please feel free
to comment to this post and add suggestions for other blogging tools I
should explore. I did look into the blog feature offered by Apple as
part of the iWeb application. However, many features like comments etc
is only available if you host it on Apple's own mobile me server.
