Changes at Edublogs… Alternatives?
For those of you that are unaware of or haven’t accessed your free Edublogs account since December, they’ve gone through some pretty interesting changes. Most of these changes hinge on the idea of needing to pay bills(understandable). It may be a hard pill to swallow if you had made lesson plans to use their free accounts to host a classroom blog since the switch happened mid-year around December. There are now ads, a huge cut in storage space, and several features that let you manage your users have been cut. In an email correspondance, I was told that the changes were adapted either to help with hosting costs or to entice customers to become paying supporters.
So what are the Alternatives? Recent Twitter posts have pointed out a strong liking for Class Blogmeister, boasting better class management, and no visable storage limits. (Correct me if that’s wrong). – thanks @debwhite and @klistar
Matt Dunlap has posted an nice self-hosted option in the comments.
21classes was also mentioned.
The bottom line though, is that the software that Edublogs is based on is Free (wordpress). So if you are a huge fan of their blogging platform but are looking for another option, you can always host it yourself. There are plenty of cheap web hosting sites for under $5 a month. Going this route would be about the same price as Edublogs, but you would have complete control of everything including themes, plugins, etc. I’ll see about posting a guide on going this direction.
Unfortunately, I think edublogs has left many of us in the same boat.
I know that this may not be a solution for everyone, but our district decided to host student and teacher blogs ourselves by using the free wikis and blogs available on our xserve from Apple. Every teacher in the district and every student in grades 3 through 12 has their own blog. Wikis can also be created and permissions can be given for groups of teachers and/or students to post information. The wikis and blogs are even integrated with Active Directory so that our teachers and students can use the same username and password that they use for logging into a computer.
[...] *UPDATE* [...]
Thanks so much for the update. I am in the process of working on learning (myself)and developing my students’ knowledge base. I appreciate the updates and have noticed in my searches that there are some sites that have wonderful blogs and yet others that have blogs that are not worthwhile. Frustrating on my end. Any other ideas where to go to access more educational blogs that are good in content?
I am intrigued that your district created a blog account for teachers and students. With this set-up, is the audience for the blogs limited to a set community, or do they have unlimited access? Are comments filtered before students read them? If so, what is a manageable way to shift through comments? I am interested in beginning blogs with my students, but want to trouble shoot possible issues prior to starting.
Any insight is appreciated,
Rachel
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