In my first month of blogging, I’ve assembled a growing collection of tips that have seemed particularly helpful to me as a newbie educational blogger. I’ll share them here, expecting that these will change and grow as my own familiarity with this medium does.
1. Create focus
Konrad Glogowski advises his students to create a goal (or goals) as one of the first steps in growing a blog. Marco Richter and Darren Rowse speak of finding a topic for one’s blog when starting out. They all seem to be suggesting that bloggers are better off with a focus.
Education was the general topic that started The Lamppost Blog. Since that in itself is a fairly broad topic, I needed more focus to help me overcome the first post butterflies. I found that it helped me to choose an audience and select a blog type.
Choose an Audience
This was simple: while I was writing this for my own reflection, I hoped that any conversation it started would mostly involve other educators. Therefore, I think of educators as my audience. I’ve found that it helps to write more easily when I can think about who I’m inviting into conversation.
Select a Blog Type
Educators take blogging in different directions. Mr. B-G has set up a terrific mini-community, with a central blog connecting class blogs and a teacher resource blog. Al Upton has a multi-purpose blog that speaks to students and educators alike. Ms. H. uses a blog much as Mr. S. does: as a space for student writing via comments.
Many educators use their blogs as space for reflecting on practice. Some have an obvious technological / social media bent: Ewan McIntosh, Ryan Bretag, Jeff Utecht, and Will Richardson come to mind. Others like Dana Huff and Doug Noon dwell at least as much on course content as they do on technology.
Having seen others do so, I’ve elected to use The Lamppost Blog as a place to reflect on teaching practice and theory. Knowing that my intended audience is my fellow educators, I have decided to set up quite separate class blogs for student interaction.
2. Choose a blogging platform
Darren Rowse offers a good walk-through for choosing a blog platform.
I’ll just add this: I suspect that for teachers, the free Edublogs platform is probably the simplest and friendliest way to go. Edublogs is based on WordPress, but has built into plug-ins that make sense for educators. The result is a free, user-friendly blog supported by a great community.
3. Experiment with different post styles
Who knew? There are eighteen or even twenty different kinds of blog posts.
One of the post types that I’ve enjoyed (not included in the above eighteen or twenty) are what I’ll call regular feature posts. Siege Curmudgeon‘s humorous daily gratitude post is something I look forward to. The Reflective Teacher (sadly no longer blogging) had a Friday Haiku that I enjoyed. Michael’s English Usage is built around a regular weekly rhythm of five daily English challenges during the week followed by answers on Sunday.
I’m trying out the regular feature idea with my own Lesson Debriefs, aiming for a weekly posting. It is actually quite liberating to write within an expected form once a week.
4. Make the medium work for you
Will Richardson probably says this best:
But the one thing the blog allows me to do that I could not do easily in my classroom before is to link, to connect ideas, to make transparent my thinking about those ideas, and to have others link to them and do the same.
In short: use links. I’m learning to link to myself and to others, thereby allowing readers to track my thinking process.
5. Blog regularly
This seems to be a fairly common bit of advice handed out on the “how-to start a blog” pages, with the definition of regular being left to the individual blogger. It’s good advice. I’ve found that by blogging regularly – in my case, almost daily – I’m quickly becoming more comfortable with it and am enjoying it more. And that’s the point, isn’t it?
6. Read other blogs
I’ve started using Google Reader for the first time, filling it with feeds from all sorts of educational blogs. I like the diversity of ideas coming into my reader every day, and am learning more about blogging just by seeing what others do with it. For someone new to blogging, this more than anything has helped me get a feel for the unwritten codes that undergird the blogosphere.
It’s been a great month of learning.
