Major Upgrade: More Features for Teachers and Students 

The Kidblog development team has released a new version of Kidblog.org with many new features.

• Threaded Comments: Allow readers to leave nested replies to specific comments, in addition to the standard chronological order.
  
•  Rich-Text Comments: Add images, fonts, color, and more to comments.
  
• Tags: Authors can now tag posts for easier searching/organization.  Tag cloud widget shows trending topics on your students’ blogs.
  
• Student Profiles: Allow students to manage their own password and display name
• New Privacy Settings - Private student blogs with public teacher blog.
• Search Box: Search blogs for content.
  
• Lost Password? New, streamlined reset procedure for easy return to blogging.
  
• New Themes: With even more to come in the near future!
  
• Distraction-Free Writing: Try fullscreen mode when publishing for a clutter-free publishing interface.
• Student Comments Tab: Students have easier access to their own commenting activity via the control panel.
• Easy Media Embedding: Simply paste the link to a supported provider (e.g. Vimeo, Youtube, etc.) and the embed code is generated automatically!
• Bulk-Edit: Change multiple attributes for multiple posts simultaneously.
• Quick-Edit: Make fast changes to posts on the fly.
• International Timezone Options: Find a city near you and the time is computed automatically.
• Native iPad/iPod/iPhone Publishing (download the new WordPress App)
  
• IE 9: Support for Internet Explorer 9 (make sure you have the latest version from Windows Update for best results).
  
• Faster Performance: Code has been optimized for speed.
  

We’ve packaged all of our new features into the same, beloved Kidblog interface:

• No extraneous distractions.  When students log in, they know how to get to work and know what to do: BLOG!
• Students are free to focus on content and discussion without the settings/configuration headaches of other platforms.
• No Advertising.  We’ve stayed true to our core principles: provide a powerful, easy to use, ad-free, teacher/student-friendly blogging solution.   

We’re excited about this list of new features.  This upgrade paves the way for even more dramatic improvements in the coming weeks.  Stay tuned! 

With any upgrade, there may be minor issues that were not detected during our intensive testing process.  If you notice anything that doesn’t seem right, please contact support@kidblog.org and we’ll look into it right away.

For those of you on Twitter, we encourage you to share your opinions about the new features!  You can follow @KidblogDotOrg to stay in the loop.

Happy Blogging!

-The Kidblog Development Team

Kidblog.org creator, Matt Hardy, was featured in the front page story for the Sunday Pioneer Press. Here is one quote from Matt, who is also a 3rd grade teacher in Minnesota:   

“With blogs, it’s more about the ideas,” he said. “It’s not so much about the original post as it is about the discussion that follows, that trail of comments that comes afterward.”

We know there are thousands of stories like the ones featured today. We hope this inspires teachers and students to begin blogging within their classroom or with classrooms from around the world.

Sign-up your class with Kidblog in less than 20 seconds.

Kidblog.org users will notice an immediate improvement in server responsiveness as a result of significant upgrades to our network infrastructure. 

Kidblog.org continues to grow in popularity around the world.  As we approach 500,000 users, we’ve doubled our server capacity in order to maintain the highest possible level of service.  We offer sincere apologies to those of you who experienced latency issues last week. Thank you for your patience.

Our support staff is always here to help you and your students get the most out of the blogging process.  Please feel free to contact us via Twitter (@kidblogdotorg) or email (support@kidblog.org) with any questions, comments or feature requests.

Best Regards,

The Kidblog.org Development Team
http://kidblog.org