I sort through hundreds of RSS items and hundreds of Twitter messages everyday. Sometimes I come across something new that really stands out. The new blogging platform OnSugar is one new product that stands out above the crowd.
Some of the features that make OnSugar attractive are an integrated quiz program, a large selection of third party widgets (like a Flickr feed), and free access to a huge collection of images from Getty Images. Those features in addition to a very clear and intuitive user interface just might make OnSugar the perfect blogging platform for teachers and students new to blogging. In fact, if I had known about OnSugar before the school year started I probably would have used it for my classroom blog. You can see the test blog that I created here. Make sure you scroll down to the third entry to check out the quiz feature.
Applications for Education
OnSugar’s integrated quiz feature makes it an attractive blogging platform for teachers. Teachers can post up to 20 questions in a multiple choice quiz. As a part of each quiz teachers can include an explanation of the answer choices. Posting a multiple choice quiz can provide students with a great opportunity to do a self-assessment of readiness for a test.
The free access to Getty Images makes OnSugar an attractive platform for use with students. Students can search the Getty Images collection without having to leave the OnSugar website. Being able to search and find images without leaving the OnSugar website should eliminate some of the “distractions” students run into when they’re searching for images on the Internet.
OnSugar is the second new blogging platform that has impressed me in the last month. Earlier this month I tried out and was impressed by Snap Pages.
Update: As Jim Burke just pointed out, OnSugar has an import option that allows users to import content from the other blogs they own. Jim said it took five minutes to import the content from his blog Learning in Maine (hosted on blogger) to OnSugar. Click the last two links to compare Jim’s blogs.
