Educational Blogging: Tools
If you’ve ever considered authoring a blog, take a look at these two free blogging tools. If you’ve never considered authoring a blog, look at yesterday’s post on the topic for some good reasons to consider it.
I’ve been revisiting blogging tools lately with some of the afterschool classes we’ve held. My go-to blog for classrooms has always been Landmark Project’s BlogMeister (classblogmeister.com). I like it well for it’s ability to tightly regulate student publishing and comments and limit the audience, particularly for elementary users. The interface is a little clunky, but it works very well. It’s easy to set up students in your class with their own blog and I feel generally comfortable using it with even young students because of the moderation options.
Lately, I’m also becoming more impressed with Edublogs (edublogs.org), particularly based on the improvements they’ve made. Sporting a clean interface using powerful blogging software, WordPress - the same software I use to author this blog - they’ve created a professional blogging environment that’s education-oriented and still plays well with our filters. Furthermore, you can directly upload photos, audio, and video to your Edublogs space which is a really helpful option not present in BlogMeister.
Choosing:
I like BlogMeister for it’s management of student blogs as part of the teacher blog interface. That would be my first choice if I decided to allow students to have their own blogs for school-related publishing. Edublogs supports student blogs, but they have to be individually managed.
Still I like Edublogs for its numerous feature options and polished look - these feature make EduBlogs my preference for the other three publishing scenarios I mentioned yesterday.
Both of these tools have been filter-friendly in most cases, an important aspect for schools.
Remember:
Don’t forget, before you do any public publishing, it’s always a great idea to keep your administration in the loop.
Thursday, April 10th, 2008
