My mother works at a large university as an administrator and professor, and has recently joined the ever-growing population of professors using blogs as teaching aids. She has created a Wordpress blog (hosted by the university) for her class on banned art and after much persuading allowed me to login and check out her dashboard. Much to my surprise, it was different, and better, than my own Wordpress dashboard. She could choose from over 80 themes, plugins, widgets, and so on. When I asked how she had access to these additional features, she forwarded an email from her colleague who is helping her with the design of the site. He pointed me to www.edublogs.org (the edublogs site isn’t very pretty, and is slow but well worth the wait), a site that not only allows you to create your own Wordpress blog for free (with an edublogs.org url) but gives you access to over 80 themes and over 5,000 widgets via www.widgetbox.com. Edublogs even contributed their themes to the university. I’m not the most tech-savvy person, my own Wordpress blog is very simple, but working at EchoDitto has increased my interest for new and cool things on the internet, and since creating my own blog on Wordpress I’ve been on the prowl for ways to make it better.
Not only does Edublogs offer more features than Wordpress (or other blogging platforms), it’s very easy to use and I imagine this is because most of the users are teachers or students who are unfamiliar with creating a blog. If you’re interested in the blog I created it can be found at penfall.edublogs.org (and if you really want, shoot me an email and I’ll give you the login so you can mess around with it as well). I’m not posting anything at the moment but am playing around with the new themes, widgets, and other features -- right now I only have a MLB Standings widget as well as a “create your own Jackson Pollock” widget (so much fun!). The interesting thing about all of this is the increasing number of universities and professors creating blogs for their classes. There is a conversation going on amongst professors and teachers regarding educational blogging, the future of teaching, and what the future teacher will need to know in regards to new technology online. There is even a large list of blogs dedicated solely to this conversation. I for one am now very interested in this conversation and can't wait to see what else Edublogs, and sites like it, will bring in the future.
