Community reviews for Edublogs

I think that this resource is an optimal teaching tool for encouraging the writing development of young students. While formal papers and assignments may intimidate students and stunt their confidence and creativity, this blog format is a low-pressure landscape for students to showcase their skills, express themselves, and communicate with their peers. I also think that the variety the blogs offer—different colors, structures, and multimedia (the inclusion of images, external links, etc.)—enriches student creativity. I also think that it is promising that Edublogs monitors content to prevent hateful language. Though creative and academic spaces shouldn't be censored to a degree that restricts self expression, students should feel secure in the knowledge that they will be safe on Edublogs. Also, the feature that allows students to be linked to their classmates in an umbrella "class" tab is extremely helpful. This tool is nicely organized, well-planned, and accessible!

I absolutely love this teaching tool and believe that it can be used in an infinite amount of ways. I like how user friendly it is for students and how simple it is to add links, pictures, ect. This app could improve my students excitement about writing. It is a current method of expressing ones thoughts and opinions, which children are fascinated in currently. As an educator, I also appreciate the security it provides for myself and my students.

is the best

It's bad. Just don't use it.

My students are really like it i thought that they never would like it but they do.

Because I deal with adult learners, I think using this as best practice sharing tool will be helpful. It also allows for learners to customize their blog posts. I really like this part of the program. I would offer the option of removing the ability to post to social sites because that could cause a problem with privacy especially, when using in a company training environment where employees may mention things about their experiences that could identify customers. The price of $39.95 per year is a little steep for employees. There would have to be a corporate account that my company would have to purchase, so that may be hard to sell.

I purchased the Pro account for my classes as I saw they had dozens more customization options among other features. It definitely took me some time to play around with things and get all of my students' blogs in "my class". There are many "help" articles on the site. I did email the company for support as I got frustrated at one point reading through all of the help articles, and someone responded immediately and with clear instruction. I love that my students' blogs all have their own style. Commenting so far has been smooth and easy. The posts look very professional, and I think my students take pride in that. Writing for a public audience has also been a very valuable experience for the kids. There are many privacy options, so I think teachers could find a way to make this site work well for their specific needs.

A strong selling point for me is that this is a blogging platform built for teaching and learning. 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. I also 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 more tricky 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. Overall, the settings and controls provided for teachers, the reliability of service, help features, free professional development, and responsiveness of support staff whenever I’ve run into a snag, have made Edublogs a staple in my teaching repertoire. So much so, I have used the paid version since 2010.

Great! As I mentioned before, I loved the options for students to customize their own blogs. Also, their customer service really was fantastic- I had to email them the first three times we blogged, and each time they replied within 2 hours! I love the option of blogging for students to reflect and practice writing in an authentic environment! My students spent more time on their blog posts than they did journals because they knew these would be published each time.

Overall, this was a great way to extend our learning and conversations outside of the classroom. I liked that I could set up posts ahead of time, and I could also lock them after a certain date. In the few years I used it there were several updates that made the experience of using it, on the teacher side, easier and quicker. I'm sure it will only continue to get better!