Edublogs.org
I have recently been looking for a way to provide teachers with blogs for both themselves and their pupils.I have been using Blogger.com for a couple of years. Blogger is now owned by Google, and it’s generally a good, user friendly platform. However, blogger is a free platform and unless you configure the blog to live on a server that you own or run your blog will automatically link to other blogs in the blogger network.
Our first solution was to build a blogging system on the school website. This is ok, it is safe…but that meant a lot of coding for every school that wanted to blog.
I started to experiment with Edublogs. Edublogs runs on the WordPress MU platform.
After a few problems getting pupils registered, I finally worked out how to use Edublogs so you can have a multiuser blog, that allows pupils to contribute and Teachers to administer. It is a free system, so it’s still far from perfect. But if you follow my guides you should be able to get sorted reasonably quickly.
* NB These tutorials are best suited for technicians or dedicated teachers with good IT skills. If you are generous you can set blogs for your less I.T Literate colleagues.
Here’s my overview.
1. Register the blog
2. Invite your teachers and set them as administrator
3. when adding kids without email simply do it like this
youremail+kidsusername@googlemail.com
*NB: If your blog is at edublogs then you have to register your kids at edublogs too.
4. You will then receive an activation email for this user -activate the account. then another email will come confirming the username.
5. Once you have added all your students log into the blog as the administrator add them. This should add all your users.
6. If you are really dedicated…you could log in as each of them and set a generic password. the students can change this later.
