If you're a teacher just beginning to explore the use of technology in the classroom, one of the most useful first steps you can take is to create a blog. Your blog can be used for any number of things including posting assignments for your students and sharing information with parents. Once you've decided that you want to write a blog for classroom use or for your personal use, the next step is to choose a blogging platform. There many good, free, blogging platforms available to teachers. The three most popular blogging platforms I see used by educators are EduBlogs, WordPress, and Blogger. Each platform has it's pros and cons which are outlined below.
Edublogs, as the name implies, is designed with teachers and students in mind. Edublogs currently hosts more than 260,000 blogs. Edublogs offers a wide variety templates, plug-ins for podcasts, and great video tutorials to get you started on the road to blogging. Another benefit of Edublogs, that should be noted if you're district has a strict filtering policy, is that Edublogs have .org urls in addition to the "edu" name. This might be helpful when trying to convince an administrator to unblock a site. The downside to using the Edublogs free platform is Edublogs is advertising is inserted into your blog. Until recently this was not the case. For $40/USD you can have a blog that is advertising free.
WordPress has the most flexibility, templates, extensions, and plug-ins of the three blogging platforms I've listed. If you see yourself developing a large student/ classroom blog the myriad of options available through WordPress are good to have. WordPress.com offers free, reliable hosting for bloggers. WordPress is a very popular platform which means that there are a lot of tutorials and help discussions available on the Internet if you need them. For what it's worth, if I was going to start a new blog like Free Technology for Teachers I would use WordPress.
Update: it was just pointed out to me, by Sue Waters, that another difference between Edublogs and Wordpress is the acceptance of embed codes. I should have mentioned that WordPress.com doesn't always accept embed codes as easily as Edublogs or Blogger. In fact, now that I think about it, on TeacherTube a separate embed code is offered for Wordpress.com blogs. 
Blogger is the platform that I use for this blog. Until this fall, I also used Blogger for my classroom blogs (I now use a combination of Edublogs and Drop.io). Blogger is powered by Google so if you have a Google account, starting a blog only takes a minute. Blogger blogs are free and free of advertising unless you choose to insert advertising. The drawback to using Blogger for a classroom blog is that a lot of school filters block Blogger. Blogger has "followers" option which in some school district policies qualifies it as a social network.
When I recently purchased the domain freetech4teachers.com I considered moving all of the Free Technology for Teachers content onto a WordPress blog, but in the end I stayed with Blogger. It was cheap ($10/yr) and easy to buy the domain and have all traffic from freetech4teachers.blogspot.com automatically redirected to freetech4teachers.com. A short video from Blogger explained it and made it simple.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Choosing a Blogging Platform and Why I Stayed With Blogger
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6 comments:
Interesting overview of the reasons for your choice of platform. I also started with Blogger, and then moved to moved to WordPress.
The migration process was pretty straight forward BUT, the connection was lost on several occasions. In the end, I found that early UK time - when few US users were online - was the only time I could get it to work. (Well, I assumed that was the reason - perhaps it was something else)
I also had students using Blogger, though we moved to Eduspaces (which is Elgg powered). The reason for the move was multiple; firstly, the students were Educational Technologists - so I was placing them in the community they'd be (hopefully!) joining when they graduated; secondly - it's possible to import posts from another blogging platform, so, if they already had a work related blog, they could use that to feed theirs & thirdly (& most importantly), the granularity of posting Elgg offered. (At the time, Blogger had far cruder permissions than it now does - it was public, private or password; I understand now that there can be more variations - but not then!)
I'm liking WordPress & its flexibility.
I'm curious as to how you used blogger in the classroom. I've tried making it work for me but I can't seem to figure out how to comment on my students' entries (which are comments) and have those comments emailed to the student individually. I have tried all sorts of things but nothing links to an email to my kids. I tried edublogs briefly but the mere frustration of changing my password 20 times was enough to steer me away. I love blogger for my personal blog because its simple. But for classroom use I"m not convinced it's the best. I think my goal is simple but despite seeking help I haven't been able to accomplish it. Any advice?
Hi Meagan,
When I used Blogger for my classroom blog, the students would leave comments and I replied directly within the comments. If I needed to make a comment that was corrective in nature I would just email them directly using their school email address. I'm not sure if there is any other way to do it.
Richard
First of all--WOW! Your students have school email addresses? I have asked for that over and over in Virginia Beach.
Secondly, does Edublogs allow embed codes? I started with that, and then switched to Blogger because I couldn't embed videos.
I also found Edublogs to be excruciatingly slow.
Thanks for the comparisons. I'll probably use your post when I'm TRYING to convince teachers to use blogging with their students.
Mindy,
I too, thought that Edublogs wouldn't handle a lot of embed codes, but I was reminded yesterday that the one of the recent updates has changed that. I have, in the past embedded video into Edublogs although not as easily as with Blogger.
Like you, my experience with Edublogs is that it does, at times, load slower than the other platforms. The downtime is annoying too. The redeeming quality is that it does provide a good service to teachers and students.
Richard
I just started with edublogs after using blogger and wordpress. i was disappointed to see, a few days after first posting, ads linking to russian brides (amongst others. I'm still undecided about edublogs.
For class I use wordpress.com and have pais US$20(ish) to upgrade to allow me to post video (but not other script based widgets).
For glogsters, voicethreads and other multimedia I've set up a blogger blog and themed it to look almost like the wordpress blog.
Michael/teachernz
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