In the last years, a growing number of teachers of all educational levels (elementary, secondary and university) have decide to use blogs (a contraction of the terms web log) as an online communication tool with the students registered in their courses. Many teachers prefer to freely set up and manage their own blog rather than employ (if available) a more rigid course management system (CMS) usually maintained by the institution. Certainly, blogs are more inspiring and visible not only for the students but also for the rest of the people connected to the internet. However, blogs lack of functionalities that are often implemented in CMS such as calendar, file storage, wiki, surveying or chat. In this work, convinced about the fascinating charm of blogs in education, some hints are given in order to incorporate those important functions from external providers. Furthermore, all this applications will be selected requiring good quality while zero cost (at least in its basic version).
Talking in practical terms, blogger.com could be proposed as a blog host, which allows posting (text and multimedia), commenting, tagging and RSS. Google.com, box.net, wikispaces.com, questionpro.com and cbox.ws offer excellent possibilities for calendar, file storage, wiki, surveying and chat, respectively, and can be easily embedded in the blog’s sidebar by means of a list of links. In addition, other interesting features can be enjoyed, for example subscription management via feedburner.com and bookmarking/sharing via addthis.com, which connects with social services such as del.icio.us, technorati.com, twitter.com, facebook.com or digg.com.