So for my class project, I've decided to create a wiki and a blog. After finally settling on wikispaces, I've spent the rest of this week exploring a few more blogs, and setting up a few. Presently I've set a blog on wordpress.com. I played around with edublogs.org and of course I'm using blogger right now. In the past, I wanted my personal blog and class blog not to be connected at all. Now, it's not such a big deal, because I really haven't maintained my personal blog much.
Anyway why wordpress? For some reason, I really like some of the themes and formats that I could set up in wordpress. Edublogs uses the same dashboard interface that wordpress does, however some options are missing or incomplete (choice of themes for example). I'm also not a fan of the ads on edublog. Of course, you can remove ads or get a larger selection of themes and the ability to create student blogs, but you must upgrade. Maybe down the road I'll switch over. If I can show how it would be used, the district may be more willing to pay for an upgrade.
Wordpress isn't perfect by any means. The dashboard interface is definitely not as intuitive as blogger (or even the "basic" dashboard that edublogs offers.) The tabs on the side of the dashboard took a while to figure out. I pretty much had to click on every tab to figure out what options there were. Some, like changing the settings for moderated comments, took more than a few minutes to locate. However, after stumbling around a bit, I think I've figured things out. I've still got to figure out how to "register" students. As with anything on the web, I'm definitely concerned about student safety.
For me, I'm much more comfortable with posting to blogs and seeing how I can incorporate them into my teaching. I can see how they will increase critical thinking and writing skills. I've been working on the class wiki as well. As I play with it, I am starting to envision what I can do with it, and how my students can contribute to the wiki.
Feel free to explore both my wiki and blog. Tell me what you think. I'm open to any suggestions.
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