Got a great e-mail from Michael Brewster in Las Vegas who seems as if not more psyched about weblogs in schools than I, and he mentioned that he’s getting some developer friends to create weblog software for his classes this fall (newspaper weblogs too!) It got me to thinking about the conversation that we’ve been having off an on in our “community” here about the plusses and minuses of Blogger and Manilla and p-machine and others. We all seem to like some aspects of what we use and dislike others. As Peter said at some point, we use what we use…the important thing is to get to it. And I agree to some point.
But what if WE created our own software, specific to education and to the classroom teacher? What if WE incorporated the best of all of what’s out there for our specific purposes, with some room for tweaking to our individual needs and tastes? What if WE designed something easy to use, easy to implement (for the vast majority of schools that don’t have the technical support or resources we have, which, let’s face it, is probably what has brought most of us together in the first place…)?
I’m really interested to see what that education specific weblog software would look like. And WE are the ones to design it, the classroom teachers. I would venture to guess that Blogger or Manilla or whatever other program you want to name was not developed with solely the classroom teacher in mind. I think we should have at it.
So, I’m on the road for a couple of days, and I’ll be hoping for a growing wish list of comments about what our dream software could do when I check in again. To keep it all together, I’ll start with the first comment.