EduBlogs

In my last post, I showed how 21 Classes provides a unique and creative way to facilitate student blogs, while providing teachers with the ability to oversee and control content. There are other blogging platforms dedicated toward education, like EduBlogs, which I'll say a few more words about now.

EduBlogs - located at http://edublogs.org/ - enables teachers, students, administrators, and anybody in the education profession to set-up and maintain blogs.EduBlogs uses WordPress technology for their blogging applications. This means that EduBlogs offers many great rich formatting and multimedia-infused features to make your blog's design and posts very attractive, colorful, and user-engaging. An EduBlogs user can choose from over 90 different slick and attractive web themes (styles) to match the personality of the teachers/student/school/etc. In addition, EduBlogs is packed with all of the traditionalWordPress features to enhance usability - i.e. like spell check and autosave - and to optimize the look and feel of each post - i.e. rock-text editor and easy YouTube video embedding.

Essentially, EduBlogs IS WordPress, which is great because WordPress - in my opinion - is the most user-friendly blogging application with hundreds of options for great front-end designs to match any blogger's taste. However, before you just cut out the middle-man and create your education-based blog straight through WordPress, there are a few other reasons to useEduBlogsbeside the user-interface. For example, EduBlogs has a forms section where users can posts questions on how the use the WordPress interface and share ideas about the how to use your blog in the most effective ways to increase student participation. The Edublogs forum can be found here: http://edublogs.org/forums/. Also, EduBlogs has their own blog, which offers useful advice, along with video and .pdf tutorials on using the software properly.

Advantages: A nice centralized location for education blogs. The idea of having a web forum featuring teachers, administrators and other sorts of education professionals discussing "best practices" and other creative ideas on how to utilize blogs in education is an exciting premise. However, when I searched the Edublogs forum (http://edublogs.org/forums/), I found that most of the topics mostly revolved around technical support issues with the actual software, as opposed to the collective brainstorming of ideas about how to make educational blogging more engaging for students.

Disadvantages: EduBlogs simply does not address the major issues that 21 Classes solves. EduBlogs does not address the idea of having safe and secure student blogs, or even really offers any sort of educational software application that facilitates web-based classroom learning. Essentially, EduBlogs is a just a blogging software. Moreover, EduBlogs IS WordPress, but it's WordPress organized as a central location for teachers. To be very honest, if you want to set up an teacher blog, I thnk the better options would be either to use 21 Classes and give your students the option to create their own secure, administrator-filtered blogs, or just use WordPress and bemefit from the 3 gbs of space (as opposed to 20 mbs offered by EduBlogs).