Blogging Writing Assignments in Meteorology Courses

The free accounts are now rife with adds, and you must pay to remove them.  For $40 a year, you can remove the ads from up to 30 students accounts.  If you are serious about using edublogs for serious education, removing the ads would almost certainly be a requirement.  That having been said, I was able to click a pop-up that evidently removed ads from this blog for one month.  Read more here.

Secondly, latex tags no longer function:  $$ \vec{F}=m\vec{a}$$, $latex \vec{F}=m\vec{a}$, even though admin claims they should.  Here is an example of an edublog being rescued by linking to external images.

Velocity vectors and pressure fluctuations in an ideal fluid flowing past a stationary sphere. The depicted plane bisects the sphere. Far upstream, the flow is uniform (and directed to the right). Red indicates high pressure and blue low pressure.

Although the depicted flow is an exact solution to the inviscid equations of motion, the flow is not realistic, even for flow that is nearly inviscid. Specifically, note the symmetric high pressure forward and aft. If a hailstone really worked this way, there would be no drag force on the hailstone, which we know is not correct. Describe what really happens in the wake.

The flow on the front half of the sphere is realistically modeled. Explain why there must be high pressure on the nose of the sphere and why that pressure is consistent with the velocity field (easy). Explain why there is low pressure on the limb of the sphere. Note the flow speed there is 1.5 times the freestream speed . Why must there be low pressure there? Why must there be increased speed there?

Adding password protection to posts is easy, there is an option for doing so when you edit your post.

But there is a confusing part.

Try this: log out of edublogs.org, clear your cache, close your browser and then open your browser again. Go to your blog, and you will see your protected post, open for you to see! This is because the password is stored in a cookie, such as yourblogname.edublogs.org. As long as that cookie is stored on your browser account (and as long as the password remains unchanged) you will see the protected post. This is actually a desirable feature if you have many students. You only need to enter a “professor password” (each student giving you a unique one) one time during the semester, for each student.

Googling lead me to this: Creating a Writing Course Utilizing Class and Student Blogs, which states: The ideas presented are based on a graduate level science writing course taught in the spring of 2003. Then I learned that edublogs has the a blog technology designed specifically for such writing courses. So I am setting up a mock course with mock students to test the system.

Here is a fine example of student writing. I would hope that third-year Meteorology students could write something similar.