Edublogs Expands Their Services: Edublogger, Magazine, and Edublogs Campus
Posted on January 29, 2008 by Valerie
Filed Under Blogging, Web 2.0 tools
The people over at Edublogs have been busy expanding their web of educational blogging tools.
They started out as a platform employing the Wordpress framework to provide easy hosting of educational blogs for different levels all under the edublog umbrella. So you can have a blog through uniblogs.org (for university/college level needs), learnerblogs.org (for students), edublogs.org (for education professionals), or eslblogs.org (for those involved in ESL education). My impression is that all of these different categories are roughly defined, so that a classroom blog could be under uniblogs or edublogs, for example. Their service offers free Wordpress blogs with no advertisements and 100 MB of space. According to blogger Baan Jochim Phuket, there is a plug-in that allows for a completely password protected blog and you can use the different types of users (admin, editor, author, etc) to denote levels of access to changes.
But lately they’ve been up to even more. They began the Edublogger blog which seems very helpful for hands-on tips, tricks and techniques to using Wordpress effectively – great for those instructors getting into blogging with little understanding of the Wordpress administrative options to customize their blog. They have also founded the Edublogs magazine which is somewhat like a blog in that its has regular articles, but welcomes contributions from the wider education community. One of their recent interesting articles was on the top bloggers on using edublogs according to Technorati, where they highlight some of the best edubloggers that are getting attention – a great summary with spotlights on their most popular posts.
And as if that weren’t enough, they have also unveiled Edublogs Campus, which allows you to set up an official campus Edublogging platform complete with custom domain, control over implementation, unlimited storage, and support from Edublogs. Take a look at their features page for more detail.
Of course this service does have annual fees according to how many blogs will be set up at the institution. At the EDC we techies have been thinking about university-wide blog hosting for a while – it would be great to have a setup where instructors and students are blogging and we have it connected so that it’s easy to read others’ blogs within the university community of scholars. But already having the WebCT blogging function we’re still not sure if we can justify a systematic set up of outside blogs (despite clear differences between the two interfaces). Edublogs is offering a great looking service though, especially the part where they give email support and tutorials videos to make it easier for instructors and students to jump on board. Here’s the introductory video from the Edublogs campus site:
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3 Responses to “Edublogs Expands Their Services: Edublogger, Magazine, and Edublogs Campus”
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Thanks for the great review
It’s just non-stop education blogging with Edublogs, isn’t it. Personally, I’m very excited about the magazine and edubloggers, as both will help those on Edublogs blog better and build a stronger community. James Farmer is really dedicated to helping teachers and students share their voice with the world, as well as provide a way of bringing blogging and technology to the classroom in a safe and protected manner. It’s great to be a small part of it all.
[...] an aside, I found this post on education blogs that was interesting and had many useful [...]