Teacher/Student Blog Set Up Recommendations

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Leigh Newton on May 5, 2008 at 10:09am

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.

Permalink Reply by Melissa FIsher on May 17, 2008 at 9:41am

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.

Permalink Reply by Joan Russell on August 4, 2008 at 10:12pm

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.

Permalink Reply by Melissa FIsher on June 4, 2008 at 6:57pm

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

Permalink Reply by Leigh Newton on June 14, 2008 at 3:51am

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.

Permalink Reply by Stacy L. on July 14, 2008 at 9:07pm

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

Permalink Reply by Jane Lowe on July 18, 2008 at 8:28pm

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

Permalink Reply by Melissa Smith on July 23, 2008 at 1:16pm

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?

Permalink Reply by Stacey Mundo on August 10, 2008 at 2:33pm

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

Permalink Reply by Steve O'Connor on August 20, 2008 at 2:41pm

I like WordPressMU. It is an multiple user WordPress allowing all the controls and extensibility that you will need. It is free and open source. The only expense will be housing it on a server which can be done in house or through very inexpensive rented shared webhosting account.

I have blogged extensively about WPMU for use in school.

Permalink Reply by Nancy Bosch on August 21, 2008 at 7:15pm

Our class blog A Really Different Place was done with Drupal (open source), what I like about it is that all the student blogs are on one site and I can monitor everybody. Each day I go to Recent Posts, see who's written what and respond. We also have the option to have RSS news feed and a place to post student written books.

Permalink Reply by Nicole Welding on April 14, 2012 at 7:08pm

I have been using www.teacherblogit.com   I have used wordpress and 21classes--this is the easiest free platform I have ever found for students and the teacher!