Working with Wordpress

Does anyone have experience using Wordpress for
classroom blogs? I'd like to set one up this year to record and share
the classroom experience. I am specifically concerned with finding an alternative to Blogger because even though the format now allows additional pages it has a limit of 10 and I'd like to set up a page for each of my students.

Tags: blog, blogging, wordpress

0 members like this

▶ Reply to This

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Michelle Palisin on September 5, 2010 at 11:41am

How old are your students?

My kids are on the younger side (8), So, I wasn't a fan of giving them an extention of my Blogger Blog because I don't feel that it's as secure as Kidblogs. Kidblogs allows me to moderate what is posted on their blogs as well as comments that are posted. Since this is suppose to model instant communication it's important to check constantly for things waiting, but I feel like the parameters set are more condusive to the safety of young children and their famlies are more supportive with them becuase of this.

JMO though- Michelle

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Karen Kolkka on September 5, 2010 at 1:12pm

Thanks, good point. Some of my students are very young. The blog I am hoping to start this year is with a Kindergarten classroom. Safety is a consideration of course. The main audience will be other faculty and parents. Is Kidblogs open by invitation only? I have looked at privacy settings for Blogger and Wordpress. If we wanted to open to a classroom in another part of the country or the world would that be possible with Kidblogs?

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Michael Walter on September 5, 2010 at 1:53pm

Kidblogs is not invitation only, and it is free, and has no ads. Quite amazing really. And the privacy settings are very granular, and useful. You can set posts to be viewable by everyone, only guests with a password, classmates only, or teacher only. The same goes for comments. And you can set it so that posts and comments have to be approved by the teacher before they are seen. It is really quite good.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Gary on September 5, 2010 at 5:06pm

We have been using a Wordpressmu install for the past two years. Mainly for students grade 6 through 12 with some teachers using it as well. I used Wordpress personally for quite a while longer and like it. A blog could be setup so there is moderation of both posts and comments although we have left ours open and monitor via rss feeds. We are using the individual student blogs for portfolios and also bringing the student portfolios together into a grade level portfolio. The number of plugins available for Wordpress make it extremely flexible. We have some kindergarten teachers that have started using blogs to communicate with parents. Our main blog that collects all student blogs is at blog.ssis.edu.vn.