Cooler Than Your Chalk Board: Blogger and Wordpress

Blogs are not new in the realm of Web 2.0 tools. But, they are still useful and underused. Blogs can be used by classroom teachers to reach students at home or to keep an open line of communication with parents and families. Students can use blogs to practice crucial writing and communications skills and to build projects that are meaningful and address real world problems. I have tried a few different free blog services and they all have their good points (mostly the FREE part.) However, I have noticed that two of the most popular and easy to use have a clear dichotomy in their usefulness and possible applications.

For a full review of blogs, their services and overall ease of use you can visit TopTenReviews.

The two services I will be looking at are Wordpress.com and Blogger.com. From the address of this blog, I would think that you might have a small hint as to which one I have decided is the better of the two. I originally began this blog on Wordpress.com. It was easy to use but frustrating because I couldn't embed anything beyond a simple picture or link to an external site. Video, Embedded presentations, and even Widgets are all stripped by the site to prevent any minute chance of viruses or leaks in security. This sounds nice, but truly limits the uses of a blog on Wordpress. Thus, let us look at the cool and the mediocre.

Cool

• Both sites are Free (who can ague with that?)
• Bot sites are user friendly with tools very similar to those used in Microsoft Office products
• Both sites offer tracking to view how many visits to your site have taken place
• Both sites offer some nice and clean themes to choose from
• Both sites will allow you to create and manage multiple blogs
• Blogger is run by Google and will allow you to give editing permission to other users (like students) you can also use your Google email to log in and manage the blogs.
  

The Mediocre

• Wordpress (as menitoned before) won't allow you to embed anything. So, you can't share videos, widgets (like my good reads book shelf to the right), post presentations you made in Prezi or SpicyNodes and so on.
• Wordpress offers to help you "Upgrade" by moving your blog to a pay server, but that negates the "Free" portion of the Cool
• Blogger is very popular and because of that it can be difficult to find a theme you like if you want something that stands out or is not over used.