Cassie’s Laws

Tonight I started to play around with primaryblogger. My original intention was to find out if I would be able to export the girl’s blogs onto primaryblogger without having to ‘re-train’ them in a new blog format. Simple answer to this one – no.

Primaryblogger, from what I can see anyway and in the words of Rich, “seems faster and doesn’t crash” which to be fair is a big improvement on Edublogs.

The main issues I have with Edublogs are slowness, crashing and spam.

Slow – edublogs can be incredibly slow and at first I assumed it was the school computers until I noticed the same problems at home.

Crashing – this is something that drove both myself and my class nuts! Quite often edublogs is totally down and you can’t get onto it at all. This can be irritating in itself. However, possibly more irritating is when you have put a lot of time and effort into a post for it to crash when you click publish. To be fair this hasn’t happened for a while but it was happening a lot at one point. This was really demotivating for the kids and quite often they did not want to write their posts again and therefore not feeling the benefit of posting their thoughts.

Spam - Edublogs has definitely served its purpose and was a necessary move from learnerblogs last year but the problems Margaret had with learnerblogs are appearing in edublogs. Margret got an alarming comment from one of her girls, Monica, saying that she had an inappropriate comment on her blog. The next day we changed all the blogs over to Edublogs and since then no problems. Until a couple of weeks ago. As all the comments come to my email I am usually able to see them before the kids do. All in one afternoon there were 6 inappropraite comments referring to sex and other things that would not please parents! I paniced when I read these and was able to sort it out before any parents or children saw them. This is one of the main reasons I am considering moving host. However, will this happen again with a new host, that’s two now that have ended in the same way?

However, Edublogs is not all bad, it has accepted everything that I have wanted to embed both in posts and in the tool bar. Primaryblogger is definitely getting there and any problems Margaret has discovered have been fixed quickly and efficently so no complaints there! I guess this is something that takes time to perfect and the creases are definitely being ironed out. Whilst playing about with it myself and Rich have also noticed things that primaryblogger does not accept. Nothing major that we can’t live without though.

For the moment I am still deciding what to do. One of the main reasons that puts me off moving is that I don’t know how much the girls will use their blogs next year without me encouraging them. Primaryblogger is a totally different set up from Edublogs and it will require input from me to help them use it for the first few times. This would be no problem if I was still in the school but ofcourse I’m not. Other than this reason I cannot see any reason not to move over as everything the girls would use is accepted on primaryblogger.

Hmmm…maybe this wasn’t the best post to write on an edublogs blog! :0S