Why Blog

Blog is such a poor name for a powerful environment.  I wish something more powerful sounding had caught on instead of blah-ish blog.  I think we are stuck with it.

Here is a scenario I have explained hundreds of times, but I haven’t typed it here.  In the interest of archiving my thoughts forever… here goes.

A teacher asks a technology director for some help in publishing classroom material online.  Here are the things she wants:

• Add new text and graphics to the site
• Make changes to items that are already online
• Make it possible for a visitor to search the whole site
• Visitors must be able to leave comments on the site
• Learn no HTML
• FTP or other complicated processes are not involved

Ten years ago, the tech director would have laughed the teacher out of the room.  The only way to make web pages was to learn complicated HTML.  All the files were then transferred using FTP.  If a page needed modification, it had to be downloaded, edited and then uploaded back to the server.  Having a search engine for a site was far-fetched.  Search engines were expensive add-ons that corporate web site had.

With free blog software, like WordPress, a teacher can be given all of the above and more in only a few minutes.  In addition, templates are available that make it easy to customize the look and feel of the whole site with one click.

If you don’t have a server, there are free blogs servers available online.  I recommend that teachers use Edublogs.org because it is designed for that audience.

Blogs have brought Internet publishing to the masses.  The name may not be the greatest, but the technology behind it is empowering.