This FAQ is provides quick and clear answers to some of the commonest questions and issues that edubloggers face. Please scroll down to check the different categories.
Quickjump:
Cost? Space? | No activation email | Can’t add users | Managing student blogs | Allowing students to comment | Embed code, iframes and javascript | Your podcast feed | My students don’t have email accounts, what can I do? |
Account Questions
I haven’t received an activation email? where is it? - The most likely reason for this is that you either made a typo when creating a blog or that your organization is blocking emails from us thinking they are spam. First, try to create a new blog again… if it says your email is already in use then please try using a free email account, like those offered by Gmail or Yahoo (they don’t mark us as spam).
I can’t add users to my blog - edublogs.org, learnerblogs.org, eslblogs.org and uniblogs.org are all different sites and do not have integrated user databases. If you want to add users to your blog, then they have to be signed up at the same site.. for example, if you want to add a user to http://myblog.uniblogs.org, they *must* have signed up at http://uniblogs.org/wp-signup.php.
Student Management Questions
How do I manage the blogs my students are writing? – This is really really hard (as each student gets their own account) and we recommend that you ask your school to consider purchasing Edublogs Campus for this as it allows you to control absolutely everything.
How do I allow my students to comment? – By default, anyone can comment on your posts. Go to Options > Discussion to set whether you moderate them or not. NB: If you turn on the ‘Edublogs Users Only’ plugin or in Options select ‘Users must be registered and logged in to comment’ your students will not be able to comment unless they are registered Edublogs users… we recommend that you *do not* turn these on if you want your students to comment.
Using my blog questions
I want to embed videos, widgets and more in my posts and sidebar, but the code keeps on getting stripped out, what’s up?Unfortunately, for security reasons, you can’t paste code containing embed, javascript or iframes into your blogs… they’d allow hackers to bring down the site (they did at myspace!) so we need to be extra secure. However, you can click on the yellow ‘A’ button in your editor to embed pretty much any kind of movie and read the instructions in your ‘upload’ area (under your posting area) for how to embed other types of media. For more information please see ‘Getting More Out of Widgets’ at The Edublogger.
How do I subscribe to podcasts in itunes / Juice / other podcast receivers?
Your regular blog feed is blogname.edublogs.org/feed/ however, if you want to subscribe to your blog in a podcast player (or advertise to your students hand readers how to do this) you should use RSS2, so the feed becomes blogname.edublogs.org/wp-rss2.php
Do I have to pay for anything?
No, edublogs is, and will remain, free.
How much free upload space do I get? What files can I upload?
You can upload almost every file type you could need, and if you want a new one, drop by the forums and let us know.
You get 100MB free upload space and can upload files up to 20MB in size… for a few bucks you can also increase your upload space to 1Gig.
My students don’t have email addresses, what can I do?
Never fear as Gmail is here! Simply set up a Gmail account, for example james.edublogs@gmail.com and then add a + sign and a number and/or letter to the end of your email name.
For example: james.edublogs+1@gmail.com, james.edublogs+2@gmail.com etc.
Or: james.edublogs+johndoe@gmail.com, james.edublogs+sallanne@gmail.com etc.
This way Edublogs will think that each email is a new one, and all email usernames and password will go easily to the one gmail account that you manage.
