education blogging market…
Blogging offers lots of benefits, but the ‘getting started’ learning curve can be intimidating (even if its not). When I talk to other teachers about blogging, they say that its something they are interested in, but haven’t had time to investigate and learn about it enough to get started. I think a great product geared towards education (or blogging in general) could create templates that lay out the sections, along with some introductory explanations of how to use it that could be edited by the user. For example, a teacher wanting to have students post lab reports could choose that template – maybe it has /sections like hypothesis, procedure, results and analysis. Perhaps within the results and analysis sections have access to graphing, charting tools, etc. The plug-ins should be intuitive and reflect what someone would likely want to see there. Themes start to do this, but to offer a more fully functioning loaded product that could then easily be tweaked for the purposes of the user(s) could be profitable.
Emily
Posted in: Week 07: Blogs
Allie 8:12 pm on October 23, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Hi Emily,
I think your template idea is a great one – it sounds much like how the MS Office suite has different templates for different kinds of documents.
I also agree with you that there can be a really steep learning curve for blogs. Not only technologically (e.g. how do i get this thing looking good), but also in learning how to effectively write for the web (short sentences, short paragraphs, content-rich).
Allie
jarvise 5:29 am on October 24, 2011 Permalink | Log in to Reply
True about effective use – I often think that its a matter of people not knowing where to start. Sometimes there can be too much information out there to quickly wade through. Consideration of your purposes can help a lot; something beyond ‘i want to get kids to write more…’
Emily