Teacher/Student Blog Set Up Recommendations

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Permalink Reply by Leigh Newton on May 5, 2008 at 9:09am

I had to smile when you said you were starting small with 16 teachers and 210 students. Sounds big to me.

I know what you mean with Edublogs. It gets easier the more you use it however. I do wish it had drop-down menus. I've been reading blogs for a while and I doubt if there's anything as useful and flexible and free. :-) Let me know if you come across something.

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Permalink Reply by Melissa FIsher on May 17, 2008 at 8:41am

I have had huge success using blogger. I use it for our class blog and 4th graders have easily set up their own blogs using it. Check out our class blog: http://melissafishersacademy.blogspot.com/
Hope this helps.

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Permalink Reply by Joan Russell on August 4, 2008 at 9:12pm

Your blog is wonderful! It appears that each of your students chose (or was assigned) the name of a president to use as their screen name. How did you handle that? What a wonderful idea! What a fun way to keep your students secure on the internet! Thanks for sharing your blog.

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Permalink Reply by LC on May 18, 2008 at 7:33am

Hello:

I'm a brand new member...hope you find this helpful. :-)

At our school we are moving away from having one person (me) keep the school website updated to having teachers create and maintain their own blogs, wikis and/or webpage using online apps.

I too have decided on Blogger, because of it's ease of use. I tried Edublog and it did not seem user-friendly enough for me to promote it to our teachers. Initially I was leery of Blogger because of the pesky "Next Blog" button which made me fear for what my students might come across. However, there is a solution to that problem at http://www.techlearning.com/showArticle.php?articleID=196604644

We will be using lots of other Google goodies too... but I'm not wed to Google and so I'm always interested in seeing what else is available.

Cheers!
lc

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Permalink Reply by Melissa FIsher on June 4, 2008 at 5:57pm

LC,
Thanks so much for the link to get rid of the "NEXT BLOG" option on Blogger. I've used it and I'm sharing it with other teachers who use Blogger too.
Melissa

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Permalink Reply by Leigh Newton on June 14, 2008 at 2:51am

Check out Edublogs again. They have improved their dashboard. They've also made it easier to make multiple blogs ie for classes of students. They still don't have drop-down menus however.

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Permalink Reply by Stacy L. on July 14, 2008 at 8:07pm

A wonderful site that you can create blogs on is blogmiester.com You can sign up your school. It is free. You will receive a password and instruction on creating the blogs. Hope this was helpful!

Stacy

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Permalink Reply by Jane Lowe on July 18, 2008 at 7:28pm

I have been using Classblogmeister with my class for a year now and helped several other teachers in our school set up theirs too. There have been improvements to blogmeister this year so if you haven't looked in a while it may be worth another look. One great thing about Blogmeister is how easy it is to move the students from one class to the next at the start of a new school year. We have students from K - 7 blogging at our school (not all classes). Feel free to visit my class blog and also look at the attached student blog pages.
With Blogger I think the cyber safety aspect is harder to control than blogmeister and edublogs where you cn set up the blogs so that posts and comments have to be approved by the teacher before viewing on their pages.
If you have any other questions you can email me: mrslowesclass@gmail.com
http://classblogmeister.com/blog.php?blogger_id=98041

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Permalink Reply by Kristi Meeuwse on July 23, 2008 at 11:58am

One of the big problems we are finding is the Edublogs seems to be about the only blog that our content filter will let us access at school. We can't access Blogger and some of the more popular ones. We petitioned to have PB Wiki and Blogger opened up to us but "security reasons" were cited as to why they won't.

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Permalink Reply by Melissa Smith on July 23, 2008 at 12:16pm

I have a meeting tomorrow with our webmaster who wants for the students here to use a private blogger that comes with the school's website's capabilities. I am wanting to use a real blog site with the older students for real world practice and joining others in cyberspace. I feel that using this locked down school blog will only keep us talking to ourselves. Does anyone else have any feedback on the positives of using a blog site that is not locked down for others to read and comment?

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Permalink Reply by Stacey Mundo on August 10, 2008 at 1:33pm

What about a social network that supports blogging? I was looking into imbee, which is free and for younger kids.

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Permalink Reply by Vanessa Peck on August 20, 2008 at 2:54am

Hi guys, I've only just joined so I might be a little late but I agree with some of your other repliers (hmmm sure I could've thought of a better word there???) I'm happy with Edublogs for our class blog and our students love it. I have to admit I have a smaller class this year with less home internet service but last year my class were constantly leaving comments for us, which is wonderful. We use our class blog as a class newsletter and print off the first page for those students without home access. My biggest problem is finding the time to update it a little more often so I make sure I don't use it as homework for the kids (which works well for extension activities if you have time). With Edublogs our students log in through our school intranet which is password protected or directly from the web using my address. All their comments hit my email before they are posted so I can monitor them if necessary. You're welcome to have a look: ness22.edublogs.org

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