Comparing Edublogs to PrimaryBlogger
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
Probation over. Next on the list...finding a job!
July 23rd, 2009 at 3:00 pm
Edublogs are going to hunt you down!
I agree with you about the spam and also need to start looking for another host. I notice that primaryblog is also hosted by wordpress so you might have some of the same problems.
As I teach secondary it is not for me! I will need to keep looking, but I’m afraid the days of free blogs and everything we want may be over. Even with a paid blog you will never be able to control spammers leaving comments on the blog. The number of ’sexy’ girls who have decided to follow my school’s twitter account is unreal.
Alan
July 23rd, 2009 at 3:07 pm
I agree, they are probably going to hunt me down!
Have you considered self hosting. Margaret moved her own blog from edublogs a few months back and now self host. As far as I know she hasn’t had any problems.
Totally agree with your comment though.
July 23rd, 2009 at 7:21 pm
Smiling. We are more than happy to hear all feedback which we use as part of our improvement process. Like you we weren’t happy with the down times issues last year; after trying a range of solutions we now have an amazing sys admin person who looks after this.
As Alan says spam is an issue on most sites and we work hard at preventing it. With The Edublogger I use Comment moderation on specific terms to prevent certain types of spam words which has helped.
Best of luck with whatever choice you make.
July 24th, 2009 at 3:42 am
Hi Cassie. I think that you need to be seen to have taken every precaution to make the pupils’ blogs as safe as possible. The only option you have to make them safe on edublogs is to upgrade every pupil blog to supporter status. This is because, for some reason, edublogs do not allow plugins on free blogs. The reason that I have no spam on my self-hosted blog is because I have activated the Akismet plugin.
It’s really annoying that edublogs have taken this facility off all free edublogs accounts ….. actually, it’s more than just annoying – it’s very unsafe! It was there when I moved the C’shore blogs to edublogs last session.
Primaryblogger has this facility, as has every free wordpress blog.
If I were you, I wouldn’t worry too much about the children having a problem with the new look dashboard – we both know how good they are at working out things for themselves. It’s really not that different if all they’re doing is writing a post, uploading a picture or embedding code.
In my opinion, you only have two choices at the moment if you are going to allow the children to keep blogging. You either need to pay for each of them to become a supporter, or find an alternative, safer free host and move their content over – before deleting their existing edublogs blog.
July 24th, 2009 at 4:00 am
Considering I’ve been mentioned twice (!), I thought I’d better join in the chat! As educators, we are always looking for quality, easy to use resources, that are also free! There has to be some sort of trade off here! Edublogs is free, although you can have their subscription service, which I hope would be faster (??). Wordpress is also free, although once again you can pay for a premium service (I think).
Also, you mentioned self-hosting, which involves some cost, but also some faffing around… how likely is this for the educator who is only dipping their toes into the ocean of ict resources out there?
Depending on how far you want to take it, you can get as good as a resource as you are prepared to invest in – time wise and financially.
Spam is an issue, but always will be. The plugins, e.g. Akismet, go some way to dealing with this. But perhaps also, Spam should be part of our Internet safety work. Many of the pupils will have hotmail or bebo, these are spamtastic! Perhaps we shouldn’t be worried about it, but should resource the learners in how to deal with that. I say learners there, as I mean both pupils and staff. It will be an issue for the rest of their web-based lives! (Then we have phone calls and junk mail to deal with too – when do we learn about that?).
As you know in Falkirk, we use ThinkQuest, so it is Spam free, but is it a real experience? Somewhat sheltered really. Will Glow offer anything different? Will the security of a closed network be somewhat false?
Keep investigating! Let me know your discoveries…
July 24th, 2009 at 9:54 am
Thanks Margaret, I totally agree. In theory the girls blogs are protected under the Carronshore supporter blog, I think?
I think I have made my decision about what to do but I just don’t know whether or not to go into school.
July 24th, 2009 at 9:58 am
Thanks Rich, I understand what you’re saying about preparing the children for the outside world and that spam is always going to be there. However, I wonder if it’s our job to do that. I have a feeling that some parents wouldn’t agree with their children being exposed to such things, especially at 9 years old. This is what concerns me the most.
It can take some convincing to make sure parents realise you are aiming to provide a safe online environment and many have doubts about this situation. I don’t think that they would allow their children to blog if they were aware of these sorts of comments and if their children were exposed to them.
July 24th, 2009 at 11:51 am
Glad you’ve made a decision. I remember facing a very similar dilemma, and was thankful for your help in moving the blogs at the time
I’m not sure what you mean about them being protected under the Carronshore supporter blog? They’re ‘advert-free’ but that’s all.
Do you think you could contact the children just now and tell them what decision you’ve made, and why? I think that you should go in to school to help them around around their new space (if that’s what you’ve decided is best!)