Blogging Tools

It has been a while since I have written a blog post.  I have been working hard on our grade 8 math wiki.  Students are engaged and enjoying writing their wiki page.  My biggest roadblock is that I only see this class for math 3 and 1/2 hours per week.  The students don’t quite get yet that they can collaborate on their page from home.  It is not possible to complete the work required for this in the little class time that we have, even though all class time is being used for creating the wiki at the moment.

One of my hopes has been to engage a groups of students in blogging about the reading strategies that we are learning.  This hasn’t worked so well.  I created a class blog using Edublogs.  We are experiencing all kinds of difficulties using this in the new Mac 10.5 operating system.  A student finally figured out that Safari worked better than Firefox.  However, our school space (where I have the blog linked) uses Drupal which works better in Firefox.

After using Drupal for my grade 8 math blog, I liked how students and I could reply to a reply.  After some of my difficulties in Edublogs I decided to give Blogmeister a go.  I’m finding that it allows me to manage student users well and so tomorrow we will give it a try in class.  My plan is to let students write away (their choice) as I work with guided reading groups.

One of the good things about this, is that I have experienced a wide variety of blogging tools.   Using these tools will help me make a decision for next year.  I believe I will stick with one tool for my classroom for the year.