EDTC Module 8 Post: Edublogs

For my second technology tool inquiry, I wanted to do further research into a tool that I'd already used once with my students, blogging. As an English teacher, I'm constantly looking for ways to encourage student writing, and I had found extraordinary success in this area by getting my students plugged into blogs last year. However, the blogger service that I had used, Edublogs, had presented some hijinks, not the least of which had involved an extremely time consuming set-up. For this assignment, I decided to explore the blogger service to see if I had missed some easy step that would better enable blogging with my students in the future. Before covering my new discoveries though, I'll review my past experience with Edublogs.

When looking into creating blogs for my students, I first considered this blogging tool: blogger. However, I quickly realized that students wouldn't be able to access "blogger" from the firewall-protected computers at school. As many of them didn't have computers at home, it was imperative that I find a service that would enable school access. After some hunting on the internet, I found Edublogs. The ".org" status of the website seemed promising, as did its education-specific status. I spoke with our school's technology head, who confirmed the usability of this website, and I looked into getting started.

In creating my own Edublog, I discovered that access to email was necessary in the blog set-up. Again, because of the school's firewall protection, I knew this was problematic: students wouldn't be able to access their email. Furthermore, I wanted administrative control over the kids' blogs-- the best option seemed to be creating the kids' blogs FOR them.

Ran into another problem when attempting this, however: for every email address, there is only ONE user name permitted. Although one user can create multiple blogs (as I did for Periods 2, 3, 4, and 5), I wanted the kids to have their OWN user names. Only by giving them their own user names would I be able to track their blogging and commenting on their classmates' blogs-- an important aspect of my envisioned blogging requirements.

At this point, the project seemed stuck. If I couldn't create their blogs, and THEY couldn't create their blogs, what should I do? I could try to give them very specific directions as to how to create the blogs at home where they WOULD conceivably have email access, but what about the kids who didn't have computers? And what if they got stuck? Also, given my students' typical lack of motivation, how would I ensure they all created their blogs in a timely manner?

I decided that, if this was going to work, we HAD to set up the blogs at school, where all the kids would have computer access and where I could be available to help trouble-shoot. I emailed the district's technology wizard (forget his name-- whoops) and asked if there was any way I could get around this.

He wrote back with some stellar hacker advice: I could create multiple user names with my one email address IF I did some fancy work with the plus sign: "+." My tech guru explained that any text entered AFTER a plus sign in an email address wouldn't be recognized when an email was actually sent... However, the different text after the plus sign would register on Edublogs as a different email address, thereby enabling the creation of multiple user names. In other words, by just using:

greta.email@gmail.com

... I only was able to create one user name. But if I played with that plus sign:

greta.email+maryt@gmail.com
greta.email+brandonc@gmail.com
greta.email+paulqu@gmail.com

... I could create as many user names as I wanted-- which is what I ended up doing. The text entered after the plus sign was the kids' user names, which I selected, using their first names plus a couple initials of their last name. This provided me with some advantages: I was notified via MY email every time a student commented on another student's blog via email, which enabled me to track their blogging requirements. It also meant I knew the password of every kid's blog, and could appropriately monitor them. Furthermore, if any of the kids ever tried to get sneaky and change their password (which they did), I simply clicked the "forgot password" link when signing in with their user name, and a new password was delivered to my email.

The problem? Setting up each individual blog took HOURS. Literally-- it took an entire weekend to set up 70 student blogs, especially because for each one, I had to write down the student's individual user name and the automated password created by Edublogs. Furthermore, I had to copy these down twice: once in my teacher notebook, so that I had administrative access, and once on an instructional sheet I gave to the kids on setting up their blogs.

That was a huge, huge pain.

However, the benefits were enormous. Students that hadn't turned in a scrap of paper all year were writing weekly blogs. One boy commented, "The blog idea [is] EXCELLENT! It is such a great way to combine a fun part of everyday teenage life with learning and education." Another young man, who had been under the watchful eye of his parole officer all year and whose grade had typically been around an 8%, wrote weekly; I watched him help a friend of his write a blog one week, and when they clicked over to their other friend's blog to see if he'd written, Jose said, "Jonathan hasn't written anything yet?? Loser!" And the two boys got on Jonathan's back to make him write. Students were also excellent about commenting on one another's work. My favorite part of this project in fact was reading the students' thoughts to one another; they were kind, encouraging, and constructive. As a result, students have felt increasingly safe in being vulnerable. One girl wrote an incredible post about some very difficult things that had happened in her life; other students-- not just her friends-- responded with encouragement and praise for her courage in being so honest. Our class communities were enormously strengthened through these blogs. Furthermore, students began posting blogs of their own accord-- poems, short stories that they've written, and other thoughts.

One of my long-term goals as an English teacher is to help my students discover writing as a powerful, enjoyable means for their own expression. I have never seen more tangible evidence of students progressing towards that goal than by these independently posted blogs that they freely shared with their classmates. Without a doubt, I wanted to continue using student blogs as a stable component of my teaching instruction; the success was just too great to stop using them.

Because of the aforementioned issues however, I wanted to go back to edublogs and give it a good, hard search. I thought I MUST have missed some easy step in my set-up; surely, not all teachers who had created student blogs had to use a hacking trick to create them??

Unfortunately, my search came up empty. Edublogs apparently used to run a partner site called "learnerblogs.org" which was specifically created for student use; in fact, I found repeated warnings that student blogs created through edublogs rather than learnerblogs would be deleted. However, when one tries to go to "learnerblogs.org" one is directed here. In wading through Q&A forums on edublogs, I gathered that learnerblogs.org had been shut down... "So what now?" I wondered. "Where do the kids go?"

More bush-whacking through edublogs question forums ensued. (Note: edublogs has MANY Q&A forums; this means that most information is available somewhere, but is unbelievably difficult to find.) I gathered from my searching that my blogging project was actually a very unusual use of edublogs; most edublogs were used solely by teachers as a communication device for parents, for posting assignments, or for communicating with other educators. Finally, I found this page.

There's the answer then: pay for "edublogs campus," and you can get all your students set up with blogs, lickety split. Learnerblogs-- which I assume had been created in the same cost-free form that edublogs is-- had apparently been swapped out for a more lucrative option. If I wanted to do the blogging project again, I would either need to pay for the "campus" option, or I would need to use the same hacker trick I'd used before, and spend the same ghastly amount of time in the beginning to get them all set up.

Official cons of edublogs are:
1.) If you don't want to pay, you have to deal with lots of ads and significantly limited options for creating blogs
2.) It's not very user-friendly; information is incredibly difficult to find
3.) It's also still "getting on its feet": there were many times when my students would go to sign on, only to find that edublogs was temporarily "down." As I had to book the library computer lab every time we had a blogging day, not having edublogs available right when we had our blogging window was extremely frustrating.

Pros of edublogs are:
1.) It's accessible even with stringent school firewalls
2.) There's a large variety of blog designs for students to choose from. I found that the novelty of creating a blog that reflected students' individual personalities was a great "hook" to get students initially invested in the project.
3.) Customer service seems to be great; when I had a problem with one student's blog, I emailed tech help and got an email back within 24 hours from their main tech support staff member, Sue Waters.

All in all, although Edublogs is not the perfect web tool through which to conduct student blogging, it seems like the best option available-- in all my searching, it was THE only ".org" option I found. Many reviews suggested blogger, xanga, or wordpress, but they're all ".com"s and therefore run into the firewall issue. When doing this project next year, I'll have to consider whether or not I want to invest my money in the "edublogs campus" option... Or whether I want to invest my almost-more-precious free time into creating each student's blog using my hacker trick.

RELATED ARTICLES:
"How-To Blog Basics:" Article gives a basic overview and explanation of blogging
Plain English Does Blogging: Another great video overviewing blogs from the funny Plain English guys
Reflections on Student Blogging: A teacher writes about her personal experience blogging with her students and offers practical advice (This teacher used "21 classes" for her blogging; I don't know anything about this network, though it is another ".com.")
"Collaborative Literacy: Blogs and Internet Projects": A scholarly article reviewing the educational benefits of blogging. (Viewers may need to be signed into SPU to access link.)