Befuddled

For one of my classes I try to have the kids blog regularly. It’s a hard thing to do from a technical point of view. There are very few inexpensive or free sites where I can have the students write and yet maintain a bit of control over their writing in case they say something inappropriate. A lot of blog sites also require users to have an e-mail address. That’s less of an issue for me as a high school teacher, but it’s a real concern for elementary teachers.

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.