Well, we’re coming to the end of the first month of edublogs… 6,934 unique visitors visiting 18,356 times and using 182,014 pages so far as part of 846 different edublogs!!!
So howabouts we celebrate by each edublogger inviting 10 of their colleagues to use the service….
In return I’ll get the next upgrade right ;) and fix up some community features, remember to contact me if you’d like to have your edublog featured… please don’t be shy!
I’ve been thinking how great it is to have over 700 edublogs going and still be into our first month and about how we can get even more up in the next. Basically how can we ‘badge’ an edublog as an edublog and how can we best ‘spread the word’?
The way I though would be simplest woudl be to put a small strip at the top of each blog as Weblogs Inc do (check it out). I figured this would also be a great way to promote community stuff, feature blogs etc. (no advertising though as promised!)
Let me know what you think? Would thsi be cool with you or just plain annoying? Can you think of any better approaches (given that the editable themes thing hasn’t quite come along yet?)
edublogs.org was founded in 2005 by James Farmer as an extension of the incsub.org project aimed at providing teachers, students, researchers, librarians, writers and other education professionals with freely available emerging technologies.
What makes edublogs.org different from, for example, Blogger is that we’re dedicated to educational professionals, we’re nice and small (by blog provider standards), we’re aiming to provide more and more freely available (and ad free!) emerging online technologies for your use… and we’ve got a much better blogging tool at our disposal :)
Edublogs.org is built using WordPress MultiUser which means that you’ll get a fully featured WordPress blogging platform to work with, for information on what that means checkout the features and FAQ.
As of February 2006 we’re delighted to be supported by The Chalkface Project especially because this gives all edublogs.org users free access to their stunning Yacapaca assessment tool.
If you’d like to use blogs with your students we’d like to invite you to try out learnerblogs.org (school age / K12), uniblogs.org (university / college / higher education) or eslblogs.org (ESL, EFL and other English language students).
***I’d love to be able to edit a themes / add something to the sidebar / tweak this template…
You can do… some templates allow you to extensively customise them thought the ‘template options’ or ‘current theme options’ section in ‘Presentation’
If you want a collaborative blog or to just add users all you have to do is to ask them to create their own blog here and then use the ‘Add user from community’ option in Users: Authors & Users (the bonus is that they get their own blog too!)
***How do I delete my blog?
Try to think of this as a bit like hotmail, you’re welcome to delete all your content and you can decide never to use your blog again but unless you’ve got a very good reason (i.e. you created it using your bank pin as an id) then we won’t specifically delete your blog (too much time / pain). Try not to worry about it…
***I want to blog from my phone / mobile device / using a third party tool… can I?
You certainly can by using xml-rpc which is fully integrated into edublogs.org. You just need to know your username and password and point whatever you’re using to blog to:
http://yourblogname.edublogs.org/wordpress/xmlrpc.php
***How do I set up this kind of thing for my school, organisation, community group etc.?
You can either run your own WPMU installation or get in touch with James Farmer (founder & owner of edublogs.org) who also happens to do blog consultancy and implementations of this kind of system at very reasonable rates!
Did you know that you get some pretty interesting site stats by visiting Manage>Referrers.
Of course, once we’ve got editable templates going you’ll be able to use a heap of systems like sitemeter or statcounter but for the meantime I think this is pretty cool!
We had a little stuff up with some user IDs overnight (blame me!) so some people might be having a little trouble logging in… if you do please try the following:
1. Use the ‘forgot your password?’ function at /wp-login.php and see if that works
2. If it doesn’t please contact me with your site address and username and I’ll fix it manually
-if you’re dealing with multiple users please email me all their details and I’ll fix that too-
Update: *with the weekend – and next round of home renovations – approaching I may not be able to get back to you that quickly on these… will try to check in each day to fix up stuff though*
