Edublogs

 Edublogs

 Basic Information

Edublogs archive and support student and teacher learning by facilitating reflection, questioning by self and others, collaboration.

Primary Use:

• [General] Create an article to share online using different type on contents (photos, videos, multi-media)
• [Faculty] Websites, Blogs, Presentations
• [Students] Presentations, Blogs, Essay

Key Features:

• Upload and stored Images, Videos, Audios, Podcasts and Files
• Add Students to classes and group to manage their content
• Write post using different type of contents (photos, videos, audio, and files)
• Plugins include forms, social sharing, maps, fonts, tables and more
• Choose who can see the site and Password protect pages
• Use mobile free apps to write new posts on the go
• Include your blog in search engines like Google
• Allows your readers to get email notifications of new posts
• Integrate with your Learning Management System with ease
• Use excel files to create blogs and users

Why Edublogs?

Category: Collaborative Tool

Keywords: Collaborate, Blog, Writing

 Detailed Information

Full Description:

Edublogs is a WordPress based website builder that is built for educational uses. With this website builder, teachers and students can create websites and blogs within an educational community while still having the option to share publicly. Edublogs would a good site for students and teachers who are at least somewhat familiar with website creation. This program is more advanced than sites that offer drag and drop building. Users do have plenty of templates to choose from and they have various options when it comes to applications and content formats that the drag and drop site builders do not have. For example, plugins from third-party vendors will allow for a number of applications that are not available on other website builders to be active on the Edublog created website. By choosing the Plugins, the user can browse various offerings. Paying for an upgrade will allow for even more premium plugins to become available.

Tool Access

To access the tool online or for a related download link (if available) please see sources below:

• Free Version with only 1GB Storage Space and limited Plugins
• Paid Version with 50GB Storage
• CampusPress for School and Universities
• Download/Add to Chrome

Advantage/ Disadvantage:

Edublogs has lot of advantages for the teachers as well as for students. Some benefits are it is a quick and easy way to create a class website, encourages class participation and discussion, provides a place for students to express themselves and share information with others, and makes it easy for the teacher to find out what students think and feel about the class and the lesson content. However, there are few disadvantages too like students may not blog if they are not required to because it takes time, writing may be more casual than assignments turned in by traditional methods which may encourage sloppy writing habits similar to instant messaging, it may be difficult for some students who have lower digital skills to blog, and students may not have equal access to technological resources.

Good for Teaching:

Edublogs has many features that allow a teacher to customize the experience, such as widgets that provide links, tags, author lists, text boxes, and searches. You can employ an available print-friendly button so that students can
print or save clean copies of their blogs for their portfolios. In the beginning, set up does take time. It can be a bit daunting at first to set up, especially if you have a lot of students and want to set up their accounts yourself or are
not familiar with blogging tools. Accounts require an email address, but Edublogs suggests a workaround using one teacher Gmail account. The dashboard can seem daunting at first–your really have a wealth of options and controls. Figuring out the layout and adding the widgets also takes an hour or so in setup. Edublogs offers a helpful blog, video tutorials on a YouTube channel. Once you are up and running, students take well to the navigation and can add text posts easily. Adding images is a bit trickier as students must work through the controls of adding images. A lesson on use of copyright-friendly images comes to the fore as students add the images to a media library and then insert in their post, giving credit to the illustrators/photographers. Knowing a bit of HTML and a few web tricks (e.g. like holding down the Shift key when you want to return but not add linespacing) can be handy. Many of these tips are included in the company’s support blog.

Good for Learning:

Educators looking to establish an online presence to better connect with their students will be happy to learn of Edublogs, which provides a complete blogging solution specifically geared towards education. Whether you’re a teacher, a student, or the administrator of an educational institution, Edublogs facilitates your foray into blogging in a safe, hassle-free, and fun environment. Create a class blog, assign a group project, or even assign written work via your very own Edublog: this platform makes it easy for your students to engage with school in or outside of the classroom. With Edublogs, students and teachers can create blogs at zero cost — and with no ads. They’ve also provided robust class management tools so that teachers can easily add students to groups, make blogs public or private, approve student content, leave private comments on student writing, or even monitor progress through the platform. To sweeten the deal, Edublogs also has a full suite of features and plugins especially for academia, such as a footnote adder for written assignments and a plugin to batch-create thousands of blogs and users by uploading an Excel file.

  Reviews [For Future Use]

Public and Internal reviews on the quality of the tool and ease of use to learn/ implement.

 Learning Expectation [For Future Use]

General guidelines of how long it typically takes to learn and be comfortable (basic, advanced, expert levels) with the tool as well as what capabilities users have at each level.

• Level of difficulty to learn/ use for each level:
  • Basic  Use/ substitution: 2-4 hours of use
    • General familiarity with the tool
    • Ability to import documents in from MS Word or Powerpoint
    • Ability to create a simple document and share
  • Advanced Use/ augmentation: 20- 30 hours of use
    • General comfort with the tool
    • Ability to make a presentation from scratch including text, graphics, video, and with basic thoughts on style.
  • Expert use/ transformative (modification / redefinition): 40+ hours of use
    • Complete comfort with the tool
    • Ability to offer advice and guidance to others on the tool
    • Ability to use the tool for various design purposes: presentation, booklet, ePortofolio…
    • Understanding of layout, style (font, colors, themes) to meet end users needs

 Examples

Additional Examples:

• Photography
• Technology Examples
• See Lessons for more education examples

 Tutorial Guides

 Templates

If you are interested in starting with a template, which often have background, color theme, and fonts, it may save time and highlight new design elements.

• Downloadable Themes
• EnvatoMarket
• Staff Generated Templates

 Lesson

 Crowdsource  [For Future Use]

To learn from other faculty or to share your thoughts or resources (e.g. templates) please see below:

• Comments (either blog style or discussion based)
• Upload their examples/ samples (ability to post information in form)
  • Form components: (For future form)
    • Name
  • • Submission type ( Examples, Guides, Lessons, Templates, Reference Link)
  • • Title
  • • Purposes/ Uses
  • • Description (optional)
    • Attachment – Upload or Link
  • Date and Time Uploaded
  • Contact Information (hidden)
  • Download Stats
  • Rating Stats

 Reference

The key resources used to make this resource page. Most all information is public except for specific TCS generated resources. For more examples and resources (e.g. guides, templates, etc) see below:

• Common Sense Media
• Wikipedia
• A Plus EdTech
• Sites Google
• Website Planet