Blogging With Blogger

I thought that it was probably appropriate to make the first post in this blog about blogging. In 2006 "The Best of Education Blog" awards were presented at the Florida Education Technology Conference. In a March 2006 article entitled, "Blogs Are Changing Education," the award winners described some of the reasons they blog. They used adjectives such as easy and accessible as well as nouns such as ideas to describe the power of blogging in education. Blogging is now being used extensively by organizations, celebrities, families, technology leaders, teachers, and students. In fact, it has become quite commonplace.

There are many tools for blogging including edublogs, wordpress, tumblr, and blogger. I am quite fond of the hosted version of WordPress. However, I have chosen to talk about Blogger, http://www.blogger.com/, because it is a user-friendly, easily-accessible, free tool. The blogs it hosts are all subdomains of blogspot.com located on Google servers. Blog permissions allow restriction of viewers as well as author rights assignments. It is not "frilly" and doesn't have an abundance of features. The fact that it is so EASY makes up for its simplicity. It has plain, simple layouts that navigate sensibly and keep people like me (with little eye for design) from getting in over my head. In addition, posts can be added using the mobile blogger with a cellphone or published using Word.

I have no doubt that teachers and students have important things to say and that this tool can be used to say them. Please share your comments and ideas.