I’ve been encouraging you to host your own blog.

Your own themes.

Your own Helpdesk.

Your own community.

Fact is mate……when you do you’ll you will discover what the rest of us have been learning and making application with much like our beloved Jimminy.

Try it.

We might just buy it.

In the scheme of things, $1000 for a campus license isn’t a large chunk of the budget, but that money could be better spent elsewhere (like on computers for kids to blog on).

You may be able to have the kids move all of their stuff from edublogs to wordpress. It’s the same platform, so it should be easy to export and import the post/comment data. I’m not sure how well that handles the media gallery and attachments, though.

This all makes me kind of glad that I came along later and jumped on a different boat.

The only problem with it so far is deciding how to set it all up myself . Picking a domain name with my name being so common wasn’t the easiest task either. I think this one will be easier to get my students to remember though.

http://www.mrjwilliams.com

I don’t see ads on this post so I’m wondering if edublogs has discontinued the practice? Perhaps they’ve only scaled them back.

Either way, I agree with you: ads and educational blogs just don’t mix.

I could unblock wordpress and get kids blogging there in 2009 but I wanted the 2008 kids to be able to build on their online content next year, as I have 10 kids continuing in my classroom and the others will be next door in my co-planning buddy’s room. So continuity is a priority. And when budgets in school are tight, then buying a Campus licence might be out of reach.

Edublogs is the easiest place to get educators and students set up and blogging – the embedded ads now add another consideration into the equation. I’m still not sure what to do.

You can sign up for as many free blogs as you want – each with 3gb of storage. You’re limited to the pre-set themes (only 70) and the pre-set widgets (two dozen). But I’ve never seen advertising integrated into a Wordpress.com blog – the only hint of branding is the link in the footer back to Wordpress.com.

I don’t have a problem with advertising per se (I use it sparingly on my personal blog), but I want anything that I create for use with my class to be ad-free. We shouldn’t be in the business of feeding our students to advertisers – they face enough of a media blitz outside the classroom (and outside of our class/student blogs).

There are some advantages to self hosting (being able to upload and choose your own plugins, customize your theme at will, include .js widgets in your sidebar), but for classroom and student blogs I think simplicity is an advantage. You don’t get hung up on the infinite options in design and functionality. You can focus, instead, on the important part – the content. After all, unless you’re teaching web design, the content is the part that you should be most concerned with.

Your blog is well done. deb

One option would be to try self hosting – something my good friend Alex Hayes has offered to tech-support me through should I wish to do so but part of me wants to continue here as a living example of where teachers can go to get started. I still like to think of myself as a grassroots person and self hosting is well beyond a lot of people’s expertise (and wallets) and being able to show my own and my students’ blogs here at edublogs is an exercise in credibility for those with whom I work.

@JD. I totally agree that the embedded text links are the greater of the two evils. Banner ads are pretty obvious but the others are almost subliminal in how they present to the reader. Then again, if people are reading through Bloglines, Google Reader or another RSS reader, these things become a non-event. But the blog represents me and my perspective – these ads mess with that big time.