21 Classes: New blog engine for teachers and students

Will Richardson announced today a new blog engine that he was hired to provide input for. It’s called 21 Classes, which I can only assume is an homage to Teach42, recognizing that they’re only half as cool as me

Anyway, based on my initial trial, this looks to be the first blog engine since Dave’s Classroom Blogmeister to actual be designed with the classroom environment in mind.

The free version is supported by Google Ads, which is decidedly not-so-education-friendly. Additionally, you only get 2mb per student, up to 50. Otherwise, it’s 9 bucks a month, which isn’t too horrible, but not great either.

I did play around with it some and I do have to admit that I’m impressed with the engine itself. I love the fact that you can pre-register students or open it up to them. No email addresses are required, which is a huge plus. The editor is decent, but nothing special. Pretty run of the mill. No ability to create categories on the fly though, which can be a pain (not that I use them anyway). Lots of options, and as I said, you definitely know that this is for a classroom environment. You can arrange students into groups, create sets of authors, and tweak quite a few settings including policies and terms of use statements.

Themes are pretty limited, and it doesn’t seem as though you can do much editing of them. However, they do allow you to customzize the major thematic elements, header, footer and sidebar. So even though you don’t have complete control, you can still do things like add in widgets.

As a student, you have a surprising amount of control over your blogs settings, so they can really tweak it to their own individual style, with the teacher maintaining overarching control. Pretty impressive!

While I’m not 100% certain of the pricing model yet, I do have to admit that this is probably the most well developed blog engine for educators. If you try it out with your students, let me know what you think!

3 Comments

Ben
3/21/2007

I used the 21Publish service last year with my sixth graders and had wonderful results. My assumption is that this “new” 21Classes service is a rebranding of their general commercial blogging service, but I was very pleased with the funcionality of the blogging engine in general.

It was nice to have them all setup their own accounts, so I didn’t have to manually do it, and then turn off registration so I didn’t have any leaches on it. The customization was HUGE for the kids. They had all sorts of personal images in their sidebars (lots of Yu-Gi-Oh!), custom colors, which were hard on the eyes, but it was nice to have a closed system for me to keep track of comments and posts. It was especially nice to be able to have all innapropriate comments sent to me first, before they were made live.

The commenting system is a little wonky, with students having to navigate to the original post in their dashboard in order to approve or delete comments on it (thought that was a bit unintuitive after using wordpress). Otherwise it’s a great tool.

No offense to Will Richardson, as I respect his judgement when it comes to the read/write web, but why wouldn’t a company like 21Publish get some classroom teachers to evaluate it for them, since they are the target audience. I know Will taught for a very long time, but a couple years on the lecture circuit can greatly change your perspective. Just a hint the next time Discovery needs you to find someone to trial a new piece of software or service (teachers LOVE hearing from the visionaries and what they thin, but we really want to know what the “average joe” teacher thinks about it).

Jamie Tubbs
3/30/2007

I love 21Publish! I’ve been using it for two years now and have endorsed at every presentation I’ve given on blogs. In fact, whenever I teach a hands-on session I have the participants set up a community on 21Publish.

I love it for all the reasons mentioned in your post. But the best part for me is that I am in complete control–I can close the community to everybody but my students; nobody can join unless I approve them and nobody but my students can comment on posts. To me, this is FAR more important than editors, categories, or themes. This is what makes my heavily involved parents approve the use of it for their children.