The ABCD of Edublogs 2

An edublog can be hosted in multiple ways. It can be a stand-alone website itself, or it can be a part of an educational website or an organizational website. There are also some popular edublog websites which either provide space to host a blog page or sometimes to host a whole blog website (some are chargeable and some can be free). 

It is not that every of the above edublog options offers exactly the same purposes. The purposes can be somewhat different as well as with overlapping common points. The blogger has to choose the right option by evaluating his or her purposes of writing. 

Some of the options can be much costly whereas there are available free options as well. Purpose and investment has to have a defined balanced relationship in order to make the blogging project meaningful and successful. 

In the previous part, we discussed blogs mainly written by either students or teachers. Being an integrated part of education, it is obvious that students and teachers are highly entitled to write educational blogs. But there are other types of writers who frequently write educational blogs or edublogs. They are marketers. 

The education ecosystem has a number of business points and where there is business there are marketers. They need to reach the education market. And the education market is made of students, teachers, parents and educational organizations. The marketer can reach them by advertisements, but now in this age of information, alone the advertisement usually does not work well. People need something more. Something to read, something to learn, something to like and something to share. And easily a blog can become that something. 

In the first part of this blog I have purposefully omitted the purpose of marketing when I was discussing edublog purposes. There are two main reasons for that. First reason is we are here in this KridhaBlog section more concerned about the development of students and teachers and not a business and its marketers. And the second reason is this blog space is for students, parents and teachers, hence not very adept and specialized enough to discuss marketing theories and implementations. 

Education marketing is a very specialized and technical topic with a lot of marketing theories and concepts. Using the internet and blogging for that purpose is totally a different subject. Discussing that will require a blog space that is dedicated for marketing and associated subjects and that is not inherently within the domain of students, teachers or parents. 

So for our current purpose it will be sufficient to understand that education marketers and professional bloggers can use edublogs very sophistically to market and brand their business interests and in that process they try to add values to students, teachers, parents, educational organizations and every other element or component of this market.

Here we are more focussed on how students and teachers get into edublogs for their purpose of academic betterment. In that also there will arise indirect aspects of business. Many teachers and some students can become renowned bloggers, thus creating a profile for themselves which is popularly known as ‘influencers’.  

Being an influencer is a very big profile which not many people can achieve. And as a result a lot of business links, opportunities and connections can happen. But on the other hand this is not an easy journey at all for any blogger. Naturally, the blogging concept and standard of an influencer would not match that of a standard student or teacher edublogger. Influencers will need resources and tools of a different level which can never match up with a standard edublog. So this also remains as a topic to omit according to our current interest and scope.

And by going with the title of this blog, we are actually discussing the ABCD of edublogs and not the MNOP or XYZ of edublogs. Thus we are at the beginner level discussion on edublogs specially designed for students and teachers so that they can leverage the benefits at their level and for their purpose. So let us continue with our objective. 

So if a student or a teacher would like to host a blog then what can be the wayouts for that? Let us explore some of the ways by which this can be done. 

In this era of the internet almost every education organization has a website and social media channels. The purpose can be either marketing or academic or sometimes both. 

If it is solely marketing, still by today’s standard of internet based marketing a website ideally should contain a lot of good content. Some of the contents are contributed by website developers and professional bloggers in case, but consistent supply of content is not always quite available for most cases.

Students and teachers can become a good and consistent source of content. And that also at zero cost or sometimes at a negligible cost. This can be profitable for the website of any educational organization. And that content can also help the organization’s social media performance as well. 

Even if an organization does not have a blog section in its website, still anyone can pitch for creating one as that can become highly beneficial for the educational organization and has no negative effect. The only effort needed is to monitor the incoming blogs for quality and objectionable content. There can be an editorial committee consisting of senior students and teachers made responsible for the monitoring job. 

This is one of the most easy and elegant ways for students and teachers to enter in the world of edublogs. As the website belongs to a bonafide organization so any blog article written in it’s website can get much more credibility and focus in the world of Internet. Even Google also prefers blogs with institutional affiliations. 

Third party edublogs or common platform blogs are website media pages where external contributors can submit their writings to get them reviewed and published. 

There are many well known as well as less known edublog websites who accept and often welcome good quality blogs from any student or teacher. They can have a review board to select the publishable contents. Or in other cases the quality of the blog is kept as a responsibility of the writer unless a severe breach of writing code of conduct happens. 

Though in most cases submission is free, again most of these sites are not as credible as that of a standard or renowned educational organization. Some third party sites are famous and highly credible, others may score too low. 

Writers need to choose wisely about which site they will upload their blogs and why they will do that in it. After they are clear with their purpose and how their blogging is meeting their purpose they can feel it right to publish in any particular third party site. 

These kinds of edublogs usually have a lot of benefits, most prominent ones are in the field of internet marketing. These blog websites are usually administered by expert webmasters who are themselves equally skilled in internet marketing issues like search engine optimization or they have a dedicated and expert team on that. 

A blog website usually needs some specialized technical settings to optimize the internet marketing. Internet marketing is important for blogs because if you write a blog then you write it for readers. Marketing takes your blog to the readers. 

There are a lot of common platforms where a writer can choose to create his or her own blogging site. Many of them are quite renowned. Some of them may cost a reasonable amount whereas others are free. This is a bit advanced option of blogging and can be a little complex for a student or teacher. This option may need some amount of computer knowledge, beside blogging domain knowledge that a blogger always has to have. 

This technical complexity and requirement can be a little negative for many, but there are many positive or benefit points also. This type of blog is almost like having one’s own blogging website. One can choose a URL name (usually a subdomain) and host his or her blog pages by using some kind of online software. Thus the blogger gets a better identity in this custom URL method though the subdomain contains the parent company’s URL also. 

The blog pages are usually developed using some software or apps provided by the platform itself. That will need some conceptions and accustomation with computer and internet software and rudimentary web page development concepts.

This kind of provider runs a common server to host multiple websites under multiple urls which are distributed to many bloggers. Bloggers need to open their accounts with the providers and then they get the access to the server to build and host their webpages.

The most well known among these kinds of blog platforms is WordPress.com. WordPress not only supports educational blogs, but any kind of blogs. Among them educational or academic blogs hold a major place. 

Any enthusiastic blogger can launch his or her edublogs in WordPress.com at a very reasonable spendings. Using this platform will need some application use and web page development concepts, though not too much. We will discuss some of them in upcoming parts of this sequel article.