Blog Juice for Educational Technology

In his Weblogg-ed blog of March 5 Will Richardson mentioned a blog tool, Kidzlog, that was being used in classrooms in an Omaha elementary school.

I took a look at Kidzlog today, and I am totally impressed with it and it’s role in elementary classrooms.

It’s main advantage is that you do not need to use a web host such as Blogger.com or install an application on a server like you do with most blog engines. Kidzlog can be installed on a Windows or Mac OS X computer.

The interface is very easy for children to use, and has a nice feature where they can draw a picture and include it on the post. The biggest problem that I had was getting my adult mind to understand that if the “Publish” icon was showing that that meant the post was going to be published (I kept clicking on it to publish, and it would change to “don’t publish” which meant it wasn’t going to be published.)

A preview option allows you to see what the blog looks like without being published anywhere other than on that computer. If you set up a web server for the blogs, you will need a directory for each studen’ts blog. Kidzlog will upload the blog files to the web server when you click on the publish button on the main screen (this “publish” button works the way I would expect it to).

You can put the blogs on an Intranet server so they can’t be seen outside your network, or on your main web server where they are published for the world to see.

Since they are on your own server, you have control over the content. This is something that you don’t always have control over if they are using a web resource like Blogger.com and do the posting from home.

I like this format so well that I hope to see a version that would appeal to middle school and high school students (Kidzlog’s interface is very kiddish.)

I downloaded the trial copy, installed it, and had this blog posted to our web server within 30 minutes. And of course this was without reading the manual

In his Weblogg-ed blog of March 5 Will Richardson mentioned a blog tool, Kidzlog, that was being used in classrooms in an Omaha elementary school.

I took a look at Kidzlog today, and I am totally impressed with it and it’s role in elementary classrooms.

It’s main advantage is that you do not need to use a web host such as Blogger.com or install an application on a server like you do with most blog engines. Kidzlog can be installed on a Windows or Mac OS X computer.

The interface is very easy for children to use, and has a nice feature where they can draw a picture and include it on the post. The biggest problem that I had was getting my adult mind to understand that if the “Publish” icon was showing that that meant the post was going to be published (I kept clicking on it to publish, and it would change to “don’t publish” which meant it wasn’t going to be published.)

A preview option allows you to see what the blog looks like without being published anywhere other than on that computer. If you set up a web server for the blogs, you will need a directory for each studen’ts blog. Kidzlog will upload the blog files to the web server when you click on the publish button on the main screen (this “publish” button works the way I would expect it to).

You can put the blogs on an Intranet server so they can’t be seen outside your network, or on your main web server where they are published for the world to see.

Since they are on your own server, you have control over the content. This is something that you don’t always have control over if they are using a web resource like Blogger.com and do the posting from home.

I like this format so well that I hope to see a version that would appeal to middle school and high school students (Kidzlog’s interface is very kiddish.)

I downloaded the trial copy, installed it, and had this blog posted to our web server within 30 minutes. And of course this was without reading the manual