It's on! Kidblog vs. Blogmeister

Spider says "I love a good race!"

Which blog will be the winner, in this case?

Kidblog, BlogMeister which will it be?

Which is the best for the students and me?

Well, BlogMeister vs. Kidblog.  What an overwhelming win for Kidblog! Kidblog was so easy to get started and figure out. BlogMeister was quite a disappointment.  The fact that I couldn't even figure out how to get students added was frustrating. Because I only see classes once a week as teacher-librarian, I would like to get classroom teachers set up and in charge of blogs for their own classes. I need to have a platform that is easy for them to set up and work with.

Hey mister Blogmeister!

I think I get blogging, but why try another?

One for this class and one for its brother?

Kidblog is good, but what else can I find?

Perhaps this one's better, I'll keep an open mind!

Tonight, I decided to take a look at another blog platform created specifically for students tonight in order to compare it with Kidblog.  I went to the Class BlogMeister site to investigate.

My initial impression of the BlogMeister site is that it is very cluttered and busy looking.

But . . . I persevered.  It turns out that in order to create blogs on this site, you must have a "school pass code." Hmm - what is that all about? There are not any instructions about anything on the home page. I went to the "initial documentation," which is a PDF form with instructions on how to set up class blogs.

On the PDF, there is an email you can contact for your pass code if you don't have one from a workshop. OK - seems like a lot of work, but I fired off an email and kept reading. The instructions have a lot of reading but I made my way through and went back to fetch my email.

Ahhhh - the email bounced back with permanent fatal errors!

I now searched BlogMeister with Google and found a link to pass code.  Followed this, entered in the info about my school and, voila, I am in!

OK - so it just isn't that friendly and intuitive to use. Every time I try to upload a photo, the site boots me out and I need to log back in again.  It also isn't accepting the images. Well I got one image to show up. I figured how to add links to the side. However, I can not figure out how to add any students to my class so that they can have their own blogs - I enter class panel but do not see the box shown in the instructions. The whole thing is very ugly to look at as well!

BlogMeister, like Kidblog emails everything to the teacher for approval, including comments on blogs.  The teacher then has final say before something is posted. This is always a good thing as most of the teachers at my school are fairly skeptical about doing things online with their classes.