Places to Blog - Blogging

A couple of posts ago I put up the statistics of my year 8 students mathematics blog.

The activities that they complete for that part of the topic are placed in a group blog. It is a part of our learning materials and their assessment. They are explicitly told what each blog entry is about and the entry comes from an online IM discussion between the students after watching three short videos.

I believe this activity has worked, it took time to plan, gather materials and create the short videos, but the skills I gained as a teacher should be easier to transfer to the next activity I make like this.

Most of the materials for that activity and the continuation of the topic can be found at
http://year8mathematics.wikispaces.com, if you want any more information about the blog entries and what exactly the students did leave a comment below.

The blogging software my school uses is pretty basic. You can not track and you can not notify the students when you have left a comment for them about their work. Clunky but the students have coped. You also have to remember the date you made your comment and troll through the calender to find it.......which leads me to another issue of design features that you can not know about until you have tried to use it. The only way to analyse whether something is worthwhile can only be worked out by working with it. No youtube video really does it justice when you are actually playing with the nuts and bolts of the software / site and trying to get it to do what you want it to.
This is the place where you lose teachers using the resources as many don't have the time to sit and work something out and I think it is a lot to do with workload and how much time you need to spend on work. Without time given to teachers for this exact purpose there will be little 21st century teaching happening in my opinion.

Back to Blogging..

When I trialled these materials last year I used Edublogs, which at the time was better than Blogger and Wordpress - I had already tired and at one point or another, I had set up the complete blog skeleton to find I didn't like something and change platforms again. That was incredibly frustrating and time consuming but I decided on Edublogs for the ability to make pages and the types of files you could add to a post.

I hadn't logged in to Edublogs for a while but a fellow staff member told me about the advertising that was throughout my blog with words being underlined and the hyperlink from the word had nothing to do with education or what the blog entry was about. I thought that was a little disappointing but because my students were working in our LMS I wasn't that concerned, it just sort of wrecked the site as a reference for other teachers to use.

Last week I was asked about where the best place to blog. I was also asked about a static page in Blogger...I don't think you can do it :-(

Edublogs would be number 1 because of the functions it allows you to do that blogger doesn't. Like add .swf files to an entry which for me is important. I also was disappointed last week when after going to the effort of placing 31 student email addresses in blogger and inviting them to their blog that they only log in as a guest for 30 days unless they already have a gmail account and then the only way to gain access is for the students to get a gmail account. I know this point here would stop teachers from continuing also; that it is too time consuming and they would be questioning the learning outcomes gained for the work they are putting in.

If I was a face to face teacher in a government school in the state I live I wouldn't be able to do this as gmail is blocked by our government filtering service because it has a chat feature. I would need to know this beforehand, so that when I am in the class that everything is ready to go because time should not be wasted on getting things to work (though I know it is problem solving). In a mainstream school after I got the site unblocked (if I could) I know there is a way of creating student email addresses and usernames for gmail which I will investigate before next year's group so when I invite them they have an already generated login. But again this is a time thing that you need to know beforehand. And if you are like me the manual and help site is a last resort that unwillingly you take if you have to.

Gee I have been on a rant.

So when I did log back into Edublogs it surprised me as it wants a monthly fee to keep my blog and 30 of my students blogs advertising free. So Edublogs isn't number 1 anymore and I find it a real shame and I do realise that they need money to keep te site up and going but surely there is a better way than advertising.

So the question still remains Where is the best place to blog with students?

Though I do love this blog and blogger is fine for the reason's I created it - the ease of sharing information from other sites like slideshare, it works on my school network, it is reasonably simple to use and most importantly it is free. The downside is you can not directly add documents or mp3s, or have an intro post about the blog.

So my journey into finding the right place to blog sent me to Go 2 Web 20 which changed it's layout and looked for blogging platforms and I also checked out the Tools directory at the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies site. I think that Blogger, Wordpress or Wetpaint might be the best place to blog for free. I don't know enough about wetpaint but from initial use it looks fine but as I said before I need to get into the nuts and bolts of it to see how it actually goes. But wordpress and wetpaint have advertsing and offer an upgrade. Wetpaint also allow you to create an educator account that does not have advertising. Wetpaint says it is a wiki also.
I also think that wikispaces is a place you can sort of blog. It has free unadvertised teacher accounts that allow you to create your own student usernames and passwords. I really like wikispaces but haven't gotten my head around how to blog in it.

My next entry will be on what to use a blog for in the classroom.

In summary:

- You can only know whether something is going to suit you and what you want to do by spending time using it and evaluating whether it does what you want and the flaws you find are easy to live with.

- Somethings like voicethread seem worth paying for but I will never pay a monthly fee for a teaching resource.

- Alternative places like Ning and wikispaces may do what you want to do.

- Teacher's won't join in unless it is easy and the learning outcome is easily seen.

- Blogger, Wordpress, Edublogs, Wetpaint all offer free places to blog.

- Please let me know your blogging experiences or if there is anything else you want to know. Or anything else I should know or read.



I've off to make a cubbyhouse out of blankets ;-)

PS: I wrote to Bill Gate's foundation this week and asked for them to pay for the advertising space on teachertube or even buy teachertube so that it is a great place for learning.....they haven't written back yet!