Best and easiest blogging and photo tools

I have a question for all my digitally literate friends. In May, I will be going to Tacna, Peru with a group from USF (mainly computer science, and some dance people). We'll be serving a few schools down there, and one activity we want to do with the kids will be digital photography and blogging. Last year they did something similar to what we want to do this year, and they used Flickr for photos and Vox for blogging. When I tried Vox a year or two ago I didn't like it because you had to be a member to comment. I don't know if they've changed that, but my inclination is to use Blogger because that's what I've always used. My inclination is also to use Flickr, because it's what I'm most familiar with. However, there are other tools out there that may be better or easier. I looked at Picasa (Google's photo site), and it seems simpler to use than Flickr, though maybe less powerful. It would also probably make the kids' photos less visible because it isn't nearly as well-known as Flickr. For me, that's significant. I also tried poking around WordPress, and it seems more or less equivalent to Blogger (with an emphasis on open source, which is awesome). Does anyone have thoughts on Flickr vs. Picasa and Blogger vs. WordPress?

Here's an photo one of the kids took last year:

Bryan Alexander at USF

As usual, everything took longer than it was supposed to today, and I'm afraid I can hardly do justice to Bryan Alexander's talk last Thursday, but I'll write what I can now (before class starts) and write some more later.

Bryan Alexander works for NITLE, focusing on use of technology in education. This is completely interesting and awesome. He talked about some of the great collaborative tools in Web 2.0, including collaborative writing and collective research. He said that there is a shift in the model of learning from individual experts to learning through networks (connectivism). This reminded me of this article on categorization and tagging, which describes the limitations of structured, institutionalized categorization (as we have in libraries), and some of the ways that tagging can change this. I have more thoughts on this article, which I will talk about later, but it's the same concept of collective creation.

I think the use of these tools is really exciting, and the formats of collaboration could really transform our culture. If people begin to feel empowered in their education, it's a different dynamic than the "sit down and do as you're told" model.