Teachers can use the Blogger app as a dedicated way for students to submit short, simple posts to a class blog. Teachers might also encourage students to post to their own blogs using the app, focusing on helping them compose thoughtful, well-reasoned text rather than multiple links to others’ content.
Continue readingBlogger is the Google app suite’s blogging platform. With a single Google login, users can create blogs and join as contributors on blogs others have created. The Blogger app brings that experience to a simple mobile interface. Users can view all their Blogger blogs at a glance and easily browse each blog’s list of posts. Creating a post is easy. Users can choose to tag their current location, post a saved photo, or take and upload a new photo. Creating a post with the Blogger app feels like the same experience as in other social media: Users can compose text, insert a photo from the camera roll, take a new picture, and tag a location from which the post was made.
Unfortunately, most of the Blogger website’s most useful features are not available through the Blogger app. The Web-based version of Blogger offers flexible features for posting and editing text, including options for inserting block quotes, embedded videos, and links. The inability to add links seems like the clearest oversight, as one of the strengths of blogging is the chance to enter into dialogues with others’ posts and other media.
Indeed, the most convenient way to use the Blogger app reliably is to compose posts in other apps on the device and then cut and paste them into the app itself. This multi-step process is cumbersome. A better solution seems to be to access Blogger through the device’s built-in browser rather than through this dedicated app.
The Blogger app isn’t explicitly designed for learning, and it doesn’t seem like an especially reliable choice for education. With this app, users can’t select frequently used tags for their posts or include links, making it tough to create content that connects to other information on the blog or on the Internet as a whole. For an extremely simple blogging experience that demands thoughtful but simple entries from students, Blogger could be a fine choice. For anything more demanding, the app has stability issues, and drafts and posts seem to save inconsistently.
It’s a shame this app is as uneven as it is. Blogger is a reliable, flexible blogging platform, and this dedicated app provides surprisingly limited access to many of the features that make the platform a great choice for teachers.