Educational Weblogs Al Delgado has been very busy working with TypePad and creating some great sites for folks interested in web publishing/weblogging tools and their use in education. His Edblogger Praxis site has quickly become a great community blog with a wide variety of authors posting there. I have been using TypePad and can see why Al is excited about it. It has a great tool set that can allow a teacher to easily create a site to share information about his or her classroom. It's visual and graphical tools make it very easy to design a site in a matter of minutes. While I am using TypePad's sibling product, Movable Type for the Lewis Elementary site and for an internal Lewis Staff Bulletin site, if I were new to this,( or did not work in a school where the principal knew how to install and configure Movable Type :-) )Typepad would be what I would use. For a teacher wishing to quickly create a site, I can't think of a better tool.

I have also found Typepad to be a very good compliment to Movable Type in that I can use its online template and style tools to easily and very quickly create (and preview!) template files. These template files are usable within Movable Type. I was having trouble with the design of the Lewis Staff Bulletin site, and discovered that I could create a template (a set of files that are used by Movable Type and also Typepad that define the look and feel of the site) in TypePad and export it to Movable Type. This is going to save me a lot of time.