Where is the balance between researching and doing?
Since my last post I have been looking at Edublogs, Blogger and Wordpress. Looking is the main word. I feel that I have spent too much time on thinking and not enough on action.
So I am going back to blogger and revise a few tutorials. Web sites that I will go back to are:
Geeks on tour
Transitioning to Web 2.0 and
Sue Water’s blog — HELPING OTHERS
I will let you know how it goes and what I find that suits me. So as Dad used to say, "Here goes us."
Templates and widgets
I would like to have a three column template. Instructions are here at this website. This is something I could try, but would mean getting sidetracked again.
Adding Images
Nothing worth looking at right now.
Medium in the middle
Right now I have to drag and drop the image to the location. It is also giving me a message for crook html that is broken when I try to shift it.
3 comments:
Bill -
Thanks for the comments left on my blog the other day. Sorry for the delay -- I make a promise to myself to stay off the Internet over the holidays and so far have been doing a pretty good job at it. Today marks my first day back at it.
I read your post above and see that you are contemplating three blogging platforms. I've used all three - extensively - and have definite opinions about each. If it's helpful, here's what I think and what I've discovered the hard way -- thru lots of trial and error over the last two years.
Blogger continues to be the easiest and most reliable platform to use. I love it and continue to use it for my professional teacher blogging needs. BUT it is not always a great pick for younger students because of the blue nav bar at top. There you'll see a "Next" hyperlink that can lead to random blogs, not all of which you want appearing on the screens of students. But not to worry - there are ways to take this nav bar off and still let viewers know that Blogger powers your blog. This is something you must be aware of if you plan to use this platform with students.
Wordpress.com has a similar issue -- it, too, has a similar nav bar hyperlink that you have to be aware of. Else wise, these two platforms are pretty nice. Not a lot of intrusive advertisements to scream about and both are very reliable. Out of the two, Wordpress is the most powerful and perhaps the most commonly used platform out there (as an industry standard, that is). Blogger does allow you to customize your templates more, whereas Wordpress.com does not (will charge you to change the CSS of a template).
Now for Edublogs. Used it just this last semester for my high school students (9th grade thru 12th). It was an exercise in patience and I wish I could report that it all paid off, but it didn't. This service, which also runs Wordpress, is not so reliable. Lots of down time this past 6 months. They had to upgrade servers at one point and I never knew day to day whether my students would be able to blog. The owner, James Farmer, got things switched over, but then to pay for the upgrades and general maintenance, very quietly started running invasive inline advertisements on the blogs. You can go to the Edublogs forum to read more about the issue (but be aware not all the complaints are listed there -- I think they've deleted or moved some -- I know mine is not there now). So now a teacher has to pay around $25.00 a year to have blogs that are ad-free. With this fee a teacher can also have about 30 ad-free student blogs under his/her account.
As educators, we are in a difficult place right now. We're nearly 11 years into blogging and many of us can't find a really reliable, good, free platform to use with our students. Edublogs was what many people turned to because of the "link" issues with Blogger and Wordpress.com. But their use of inline ads is very offensive and I can no longer recommend this service to educators unless you have adequate funds. Even then, they have a track record of being down and slow -- something that is really hard to deal with in the educational setting. So not only do you have to have funds, but lots of patience if you go with Edublogs.
Hope some of this helps. I think it's great that you are looking so thoughtfully at blogging with your students. If your administrators are okay with you teaching students how to take off the blue nav bar in Blogger and then using that platform, that's the route I'd suggest. If they don't like that idea, I've got an alternate idea for you that is a bit more involved. Email me or get in touch for me if and when you need to cross that bridge.
Some people say there is no such thing as a "free lunch" and I suppose this is what they're talking about in regards to blogging. Best wishes on your new journey. :)
Bill -
Sorry - forgot to answer another question you left. Yes, you can get your students to connect their blogs via blogroll lists. One trick I've used is to make a wiki where students can drop by and copy/paste their blog addresses so everyone in the class can access each others blogs easily and quickly. I suppose there are lots of ways. You could also gather all the blog addresses/rss feeds in Google Reader (or another aggregator) and then share them that way, etc.
Happy Blogging! JB
Hi Janette,
Thanks for you considered reply.
Part of the Year 11 and 12 IT Course changes here in Victoria were to add some collaborative tasks and group work as a project management team.
I made a start at using blogger with a Year 11 class in the sense of creating a class blog and getting them to comment.
Also used Edublogs as part of a unit I did called Online Education and Training at Melbourne Uni as part of a M Ed that I am doing. For the first few weeks, it seemed that every time we tried to log in, either our login failed or the server was down.
You seemed to have saved me a great deal of time and energy by summing up:
(1) blogger is simple and OK.
(2) wordpress is more powerful
(3) Edublogs is wonky.
So I'll concentrate on Wordpress and Blogger for the next few weeks.
I saw a survey of the blogosphere stats and was surprised at how many of the users were English teachers and how few IT teachers used blogs.
Go figure?
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