I have used 21 Classes. It’s a nice site with fairly easy to figure out controls. When I first tried it out they let you sign up 50 students for free. That’s been cut back to 10 which isn’t terribly useful. For $8.95/month you can raise that to 100, but with classroom budgets under strain it’s not easy to find $89.50/year for blogging.

KidBlog seems to be a new and cool solution to the problem. For those who blog on other sites, it seems to run off a WordPress engine (which I like). From the teacher’s point of view, it allows you to create sttudents without them having to have e-mail. You can set it so student posts must be approved by you first, and you can even keep your whole blogging coummunity private  if you like.

KidBlog also allows you to set up multiple teachers/administrators on one account, and seems to have some way to link the kids to more than one class. This opens up room for collaboration between teachers and classes which could have interesting possibilities at the high school end of things.

As far as appearances go, KidBlog offers only two templates for personalizing your site. It’s not much, but this isn’t a crucial issue unless you’re hyper sensitive about their design choices.

KidBlog is free at this point and there’s no indication that any change is in the works. It looks like a pretty cool blogging platform that will satisfy almost any teacher, and almost any administrator.

They’ve been using Weebly for the exercise. Weebly is a really amazing site that allows you to create your own website using one of their subdomains (something.weebly.com) or lets you attach your own domain name (for free on their part) if you know how to do the technical stuff.

There’s a lot of cool templates and lots of easy things you can pull into you site like YouTube videos and a long series of pictures.

The only thing you give away is a single line at the bottom of every page that says “Create a free website with Weebly.” That’s hardly a high price to pay for something like this.

While the projects, as they get done, are fairly amazing, we are having some frustrations with Weebly. It’s sometimes, and inconsistently, difficult to edit text, or delete parts you’ve added to a page. The inconsistency suggests that the bugs aren’t completely ironed out on Weebly’s end. Adding YouTube videos is a bit cumbersome and hardly intuitive.

I imagine these things will all be ironed out as Weebly grows, and so I’d readily recommend Weebly for classroom activities or personal use.

I don’t have a smart board that can record all my doodles, so I took pictures of my diagrams as I made them, put them in a powerpoint and uploaded them. I need to work on the contrast on the white board I used (the glare caused problems), but it wasn’t a bad first attempt. The concept is worth trying again. The execution needs a bit of work.