ClassBadges.com is an exciting new site that provides an easy and fun way to award badges to students.

From classroom and school awards, to badges for the mastery of learning material, ClassBadges has it all.

And now, you can award badges for blogging – such as for quality posts and number of comments – with many more to come!

The ClassBadges Plugin

The new plugin makes it easy to display earned badges in the sidebar of a blog.

To learn more about the plugin, check out this support post.

More To Come

Let us know in the comments below what blogging badges you’d like to be able to award or earn.

We’ll take your ideas and do our best to turn them into badges on the classbadges.com/edublogs page!

And, we’re happy to share, we’ve been working hard organizing a Posterous importer as quite a few of our Edublogs users have Posterous accounts.

When you migrate your Posterous account into Edublogs it will import:

1. All image files
2. All video files
3. All audio files
4. All posts
5. All comments
6. All media that has been embedded using embed code

You can easily import your posts into any Edublogs Campus and Edublogs Pro or upgraded blog.

Just go to Tools > Import and use one of the two import options:

• Posterous – Use if you haven’t uploaded video and audio files to your Posterous account.
• Posterous XML – use if you have uploaded video and audio files to your Posterous account.

Refer to this step by step instructions for importing your Posterous account into Edublogs.

There are numerous options for migrating Posterous to different blogging platforms but most are having the same challenge.

Here is what you need to know:

1. Complete Media Transfer

Most platforms are able to import Posterous posts with images but aren’t able to migrate a complete media transfer if you have audio and video files uploaded to your Posterous account.

This means if you currently import a Posterous account into another blogging platform, and have uploaded any audio or video files, the posts are imported but the audio or video files remain on the Posterous service.

These audio and video files need to be imported into your new blog otherwise when Posterous shuts down these media files will be lost.

Edublogs is one of the few platforms that can migrate a complete media transfer so all your audio and video files are imported into your Edublogs blog when you import from Posterous.

2.  Embed Code

The other aspect you need to consider is that Posterous allowed you to embed a wide range of media such as Prezzi, AudioBoo, Google Forms, Glogster using embed code.

Not all platforms allow you to use embed code as Edublogs does.  If you import your Posterous account into a platform that doesn’t allow embed code you’ll lose all your embeds.  You don’t lose any embeds when you import into an Edublogs blog.

3.  Comments

Some platforms also can’t import your comments, so be sure to check this first.

 We look forward to helping users move their existing work over and are happy to answer your questions!

Even better, all of these themes come with these fun features:

• designed to look great on tablets, phones, and desktops!
• change backgrounds and colors with ease
• add custom header images
• clean and easy to read

You can easily find all of these themes by going to Appearance > Themes in your dashboard.

They are all listed in the brand new “Featured Themes” section right at the top of the page!

Take a look through the new themes below and then give your blog an overdue new look!

Brand New Day

Fun theme with four backgrounds to choose from – one for each season!

Hum

Great for large images – and a simple layout.

Grisaille

With a “newspaper” feel, this theme is great for sites with a lot of content.

Publish

A perfect theme for an ePortfolio!

Quintus

Change colors and really customize this theme.

Reddle

Lots of white space – great for a class blog.

Responsive

Great for a traditional website – tons of menu and widget options.

Runo Lite

With fun backgrounds – including the look of paper!

Twenty Twelve

Versatile and powerful – great for websites, blogs, and more!

New School Theme

Designed specifically for our Edublogs Campus networks, this theme is a bit different than the others – Campus Default 2013.

We decided to make it available to everyone as it may be a perfect fit for schools, clubs, and others too.

Take a look!

Features includes:

• special ‘static homepage’ design
• easily brand with colors and logos
• add a custom menu and a login box will appear
• widgets for featured blogs, latest posts, and more

Try out one or more of the new themes and let us know what you think!

And, you should know, we have big plans to make 2013 the biggest edublogging year yet.

Before we get to the new toys to play with, check out this excellent video from Mr. Avery’s Classroom Blog as his students share their “12 Days of Blogging”.

Here is their list :

1. friends around the world
2. mystery skypes
3. 3 Eddie Nominations
4. 4KM and 4KJ
5. math movies
6. projects funded (from DonorsChoose.org)
7. students blogging
8. collaborative projects
9. students commenting
10. google maps
11. new posts
12. clustrmap hits

A huge thanks to Mr. Avery’s class for such excellent examples of student blogging and allowing us to share your work here!

Let It Snow Plugin

The popular ‘Let It Snow Plugin’ is now back and better than ever. On all blogs, just go to the Plugins menu, click Activate and watch the snow fall on your blog!

Email Subscription

One of the most useful features available is the ability to let parents, students, and visitors signup to get email notifications of all new posts on a blog.

All you have to do is go to Appearance > Widgets and add the Email Subscription widget to a sidebar to set it up.

And as of today, you can now see a list of all those that have subscribed, export a list of subscribers, and delete subscribers when needed.

This is just the beginning of better user and subscriber management tools we have in the works. :)

Happy Holidays!

From all of us here at Edublogs, we wish you, your students, and families a Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and an excellent New Year!

The plugin makes three snazzy widgets available which you can use to display the latest kid-friendly news and current events, book reviews, and movie reviews right in your sidebar.

Many of our users are using content from Dogo as blog post topics and other assignments. Hopefully these new widgets will help spark ideas and foster even more discussions.

How do I get the plugin?

It’s easy :)

1. Login to your blog’s dashboard
2. Click on ‘Plugins‘ on the left side of your dashboard
3. Find the ‘DOGO Content Widget’ plugin and click ‘Activate‘
4. Go to ‘Appearance‘ > ‘Widgets‘ and move the new DOGO widgets over to your sidebar of choice

Three years ago, an eleven-year-old blogger here on Edublogs wrote a post about his favorite lunch food – salami.

As part of his post, he used Google Images to find a quick photo of salami that he then uploaded to his blog.

Fast forward to now.

Our Edublogs support team just received a lengthy cease and desist letter from a large law firm that represents the photographer of the salami photo. The formal letter describes all sorts of legal problems for Edublogs and the author of the blog should we not immediately remove the photo in question.

We get these letters daily, but what stood out about this one is that the photo was several years old and not particularly interesting or unique. Most of the complaints we get come from the use of things like maps and curriculum documents.

This tasty looking photo looked a lot like this one:

*For the record, we have permission to share this photo from a stock image site that we pay for.

What does this mean for teachers and students?

It is important to know that even the most innocent of actions can lead to bigger problems down the road.

Using Google Images or copying a photo from most websites is much like plagiarism. Hopefully, by educating each other, we can avoid mistakes like this one and promote fair use of photos and other media on the web.

If you are looking to learn more about copyright, creative commons, and where to find images you can actually use, check out this recent Teacher Challenge post here.

At any rate, we thought this might be a funny example to share.

P.S. When researching for this post, I discovered that when you search for ‘Edublogs Salami’ on Google, you get over 42,000 results. What are our users writing about!? :)

Happy blogging!

We thought you might enjoy a screenshot from The Wayback Machine of what our first site looked like just a few weeks after launch:

And two years later, with 100,000 blogs in 2007, our main site looked like this:

The best part of all is that to us, we feel like we are just getting started.

With over 1.3 million blogs here on Edublogs.org, and over half-a-million more on our Edublogs Campus networks, we will breaking the 2 million blog barrier very soon!

From all of us here on the Edublogs team, we truly appreciate all of the support we’ve received over the years from all of our users.

And we look forward to bringing blogging into more and more classrooms in the years to come!

Happy blogging!

We are thrilled to announce some big changes and improvements to Edublogs!

Our focus this summer is to raise the bar in what we offer so that we continue to be the best blogging, ePortolio, and class website service for teachers and students around the world.

To help us reach this goal, we start by bringing you…

Unlimited Student Blogs!

Previously, each Pro account could only enable extra features on up to 50 student blogs. But we know many teachers can have well over 100 students at any given time.

Student blogs will be able to access premium themes, use our new iOS mobile app, embed videos and other code, and the full range of privacy options.

In addition, students will be able to fully manage the look and feel of their blogs, but won’t be able to change the privacy and moderation settings you set for them.

The NEW ‘My Class’ Feature

This is the big one. Now that you can have unlimited students on Edublogs, you need a good way to manage them all!

You will find a new ‘My Class’ menu item near the top of your blog’s dashboard.

From here you can manage the privacy and moderation settings on all student blogs, get a list of pending comments and posts, and more.

As soon as a student blog is added to a class, it will automatically have the extra features enabled as discussed above.

This is just the first launch - so expect improvements and additions in the coming months!

Better Help & Support

You’ll find a brand new ‘Help & Support‘ menu item in your dashboard with quick links to our user guides and support posts.

There’s also an easier to find link for our Pro users to email questions directly to our support staff.

New Theme Customizer

Go to Appearance > Themes and check out the new ‘Customize‘ link.

From here you can quickly edit the look and feel of your blog’s title, background, and custom images and see how it looks live in real time. This addition is just plain fun to play with :)

And Tons More…

There are lots of other new features and changes you may notice. For example:

• An improved and simplified image and media uploader
• A fresh new look to the dashboard and top admin bar
• Flyout menus that keep the menu items nice and neat
• Better usability on tablets and mobile devices (no app needed!)
• An improved ‘Inactive Widgets‘ area to save widgets and so widgets don’t get lost when changing themes
• Embed tweets into any post by just pasting in the link
• Behind the scenes changes to improve speed

All of this is available now on Edublogs.org and will be coming soon to our Edublogs Campus networks.

Leave a comment below or contact us with any feedback or questions you may have.

Happy blogging!

Kicking off what is shaping up to be the biggest summer in Edublogs’ history, we’re proud to unveil our brand new official iOS app.

Get it now in the App Store!

From the iPhone and iPad, Edublogs Pro, upgraded, and Campus bloggers can sign in, write posts, upload photos, manage comments, and more with ease!

We’ll whet your appetite with a few screenshots below.

And don’t worry Android users – we certainly haven’t forgot about you ;)

Happy mobile blogging!

iPhone Login Screen

iPhone Post Editor

Editing comments on the iPad