I just want to (edu)Blog!
Posted by Chris on September 11, 2008
I really like Edublogs. James is a great guy, and the service he has put together is pretty awesome most of the time. So awesome in fact that I recommend it highly to any teachers who want to try blogging with their students. It has all the cool features, plugins and themes, as well as just being a really good blogging service.
When it works.
Just lately, Edublogs seems to have been plagued with problems, with the recent need for multiple password resets, general system slowness and, today, a period of maintenance that saw it become unavailable for over an hour. Normally, I wouldn’t complain… after all it’s a free service and I don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth, but it went down smack in the middle of a Year 4 class that were finally looking forward to blogging after spending the last few periods trying to recover from those random password resets! Last lesson we finally got all the kids logged in with new passwords, got them to change their passwords to something they could remember, even wrote their passwords down so they wouldn’t forget them… and then today we find that half of them had their passwords reset again (!)
During the lesson the whole system then became unavailable and was supposed to be back online “very very soon”. I’m not sure what that translates to in minutes, but it went way beyond the end of our classtime. Now the kids don’t have another class till next week and we are nearly at the end of term and they have a major blogging project to try and complete. Very frustrating!
I’m sure we’ll manage, and I’m sure there are people in the world with much bigger problems than having their blog provider be out of action for an hour or so, but still, in a school where I’m trying to win people over to technology – especially web 2.0 technology – it’s pretty frustrating when the same class seems to get hit with access issues over and over.
Please Edublogs! I love ya, but can I have my reliability back!
BTW, here are some comments from the Year 4 students… they are just as frustrated and can’t understand why they seem to have problems every single time they attempt to blog.
