Checking Out Edublogs
I was just setting up a new blog over at Edublogs for a teacher friend of mine. Edublog is a free (with optional upgrade) blog hosting site targeted specifically at educators. It runs Wordpress blogs and they offer a nice array of pre-loaded themes, plugins and widgets, I was pretty impressed.
Since I host my own blogs, I’m used to complete control over how things looks (I find the inability to edit themes on Edublogs particularly nettlesome) but for someone without the ability, time or interest to host their own, this is a nice alternative. And it is a joy to let someone else worry about upgrades and administration for once.
I checked into it because a colleague has a school-related blog on Blogger and was wondering about the ease of students to stumble upon less savory blogs there. That’s a great reason to use education sites, that whole “go to next blog” thing. Some folks are more nervous about 2.0 applications in the classroom than others, and I think it’s a good idea to do what we can to put them at ease.
Checking out the widgets I saw they had one for Picasa, so I thought I’d try that out too. It’s yet another very nice service from Google. They have a simple uploading utility, you can just drag in pictures (even from iPhoto - which I find doesn’t work well with all applications) and click upload. Using the widget, they appear on the blog immediately, which should work nicely for my friend while she’s traveling.
I did have a bit of a fight with the Google Maps plugin, and decided that just linking from a static picture of my map to the one I saved on Google was a more elegant way to go.
And considering that the spam filter on this blog has caught over 23,000 spams (!) I’m glad Edublog is offering that plugin as well.
I love Wordpress, and I find the themes so much prettier than Blogger. I definitely recommend checking out Edublogs if you’re thinking about starting your first blog.