Free WordPress blogs for educators

Are you an educator and looking for a free place to host a WordPress blog?

Check out http://edublogs.org. WordPress blogs have many advantages over other blogging services like Blogger, although Blogger is continually improving. As an example, Blogger now supports uploading photos directly to your blogger account without using another service like Flickr. This is a very nice improvement. The new Blogger for Word (Windows users only I think) looks like a useful tool also that is also new.

In terms of answering the question “why wordpress instead of blogger,” this layman’s comparison is pretty good. The main reason I made the switch from a FTP based / non-server based blog tool (iBlog) to WordPress was WP’s ability to let me tag posts with multiple categories. Neither Blogger (which is server based and doesn’t require knowledge/use of ftp client software) nor iBlog support this– you can get iBlog to do it, but it requires some technical coding changes and isn’t super easy.

Last time I checked (today) Blogger still did not support post categories and tagging. This is a major missing piece, especially if you want to use a tool like technorati and have your entries indexed there.

The best blogging tool I have found yet (and worked with for several weeks now) is Ecto. It is great to compose blog posts offline with spell check, and superfast to post and post edits.