Now that my school year is over I’m taking a short fly fishing vacation. The posts for the rest of the week highlight my favorite resources of 2011 so far.


There is no shortage of blogging services available for free to teachers and school administrators. Some free services offer more features than others. One newer blogging service that is offering a lot to teachers at no cost is Class Blogs.

Class Blogs is a blogging service based on the WordPress Multi User platform. The service isn’t open to everyone yet, you have to register for an invitation, but for your consideration here is a run-down of what they offer. Users can create as many free, ad-free blogs as they like. This means that for someone like myself who teaches multiple sections of a course, each section could have its own blog. If you plan to have students blogging, you can batch register students to expedite the process of joining your blog. Class Blogs also aims to be a LMS by offering you the option to create, distribute, and grade student assignments online. Finally, Class Blogs has an option for giving live online presentations.

Applications for Education
If Class Blogs delivers on all that it promises in its features list, it could become a central location for all of the online materials you use in your classes. Not only will you be able to do all of the things that blogs are great for, like keeping a record of your lessons, students sharing insights, but you will also be able to give presentations online and keep track of grades. Those last two items are not something you can do within most blogging platforms.