21Classes: Create a Virtual Classroom to Get your Students Blogging

Nowadays, Singapore kids are quite Internet-savvy and it’s a common sight to see students in a class getting together and create class blogs. The main purpose of a class blog is for students and teachers to share their thoughts and opinions with one another. Sometimes, the latest events or homeworks are also posted up there for them to complete. Most of the blogs are hosted on Google’s Blogger instead of self-hosting as it requires quite a lot of money.

An impressive and useful service, 21Classes enables teachers and students to create a virtual classroom which offers many benefits. For teachers, they can communicate or collaborate with their students online via the portal or make important announcements on the class homepage. As for students, they are able to post blog entires to share their personal views or thoughts about a particular topic, upload text, photos, or insert videos. By interacting with one another outside school, it’s indeed a wonderful and fun learning experience.

classroom

Teachers or site admins can gain control of students entries and may choose to moderate every new entry posted by a student before it’s published. This is to ensure that they have not included vulgarities or offensive words in their posts. As a student myself, I’m pretty sure that students tend to spam blogs to vent their anger. Therefore with 21Classes advanced privacy settings and spam protection, teachers can set all entries on their BlogPortal to be private with just one click to prevent other non-registered students to view them. Just like any other blogging platform on the web, the admins have the ability to allow students to decide for themselves if an entry should be private or public and if comments may be written by everyone or just registered users. For customization, there are many themes or templates to choose from but if you’re experienced in CSS, you can upload a custom-made template too to enhance the design and layout of your personalized class blog.

Hosting a blog on 21Classes is free to use and no installation or downloads needed. However, if teachers would like additional features such as tag clouds, powerful fulltext search, use of own domain and 25 MB webspace per student (instead of 1 MB), they can upgrade for a monthly fee of $8.95.

Some of guys might say that creating a class blog on Blogger would be much better as it offers more features and templates. However, 21Classes specializes only in educational blogs for teachers and students to interact when they are outside schools. As a result, the features that they offer are mainly for educational purposes and most of them can’t be found in Blogger or WordPress.

Technology is moving at a really fast rate and even the schools are also following the trend too. There are many debates out there arguing about whether or not the future education would be virtual schools instead of the current physical classrooms. In my own opinion, the traditional way of teaching and studying will not be abolished and will continue to stay forever. e-Learning may be part of education but it will never replace the entire education system.