One of the hardest things to get students to do – especially high school students who have learnt that writing is boring – is to just sit down and write, dammit. Platforms get in the way because, to be “21st century,” it needs to be published and open for other people to see…unless you’re a nut job…you can’t see it. Better put it in the LMS so I can easily assign a grade, etc.

Something like this makes much more sense. Why shouldn’t I host my own student’s content? Well, I tried that one year, and to be honest, it made me never want to be a system admin. Managing 150+ student blogs, all connected back to a class blog through a really bad implementation of a WPMU site was a mistake. Buuut…

Something like this – no login, no saving, no version management – makes it easy to sit down and just write. I’ll be over on GitHub, if you need anything.

I did this mostly to see what Alan kept on barking about, and to his credit, it rocks. I may be doing this one my own.