I have been missing out. Since I started this blog a little over a week ago, I have been scouting for other teacher bloggers, and I haven’t been disappointed. I think I’ve added about ten teacher blogs to my blogroll. I have noticed that the majority of the teacher blogs I’ve found are run by Blogger (BlogSpot). I was curious about this. Obviously, Blogger is free and looks very professional. It’s user-friendly, and has an easy-to-learn interface. It’s also very popular for blogging in general — in fact a recent study concluded they were the top hosted blog site. On the other hand, I have not found that many teacher blogs hosted on their own domain and run by either Word Press or Movable Type, like this one. I suppose one reason for that could be that teachers are not paid well, and domains are not free (though you can find deals that make them pretty cheap). I don’t think it is a question of technological proficiency, because Blogger is not any easier or more difficult to use than Word Press or MT. If one wants just blogging space, Blogger is probably the best bet. I just found it curious.
You know what I’d like to see? Jim Burke blogging. That would be a hell of a daily read. Jim, I volunteer to install MT for you! Free!
I'm a teacher-blogger! Check out "blogs" in my categories! (Great template, by the way) I, too, teach English.
I'm a teacher-blogger, although I'm teaching college mathematics and not English. (Sometimes I have to teach that, too…) My blog's about education as well as faith, family, technology, and other stuff, and the intersections among all these things. I use MovableType; if I had it to do over again, I'd probably use TypePad instead. Just easier to deal with than web hosting. Blogger is very popular because it's free, but I don't like it because (a) the Blogger servers seem to go down all the time, and (b) many times you have to register with Blogger in order to leave comments, and I think that you should be able to comment on any blog at any time without having to feed personal info into somebody else's server. Just my own little peeve there.
I use blogger because it just takes less time – I used to write all my code myself, tried MT and finally realized that with blogger, it was very quick, easy and could be done from anywhere. Even the remoteness of the western US, where indoor plumbing is not a given. FWIW – blogger only requires commenters to log in when the author chooses that feature. They may do so because of spammers or other problems… but it's not just an info. gathering feature.
I think your blog is fascinating! The content and links were both interesing and enjoyable. I will definitely return to peruse them at more length. I am a graduate student in a visual literacy course that is trying to understand the value of blogging with hopes of someday incorporating useful blogs ourselves. As an aside, we are using blogger because primarily because it is free and fairly accessible to those of us new to the blogworld. Regardless, though much of this is new to me, I am encouraged by seeing sites such as yours.