Monthly Archives: April 2009

Making It Easier For Your Intended Audience To Read Posts!

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Encouraging parents or other teachers to read your blog(s) can be hard work! Not surprising when you consider reading blogs and writing comments is a totally foreign concept to most of them.

What’s needed is to look at the problem from another angle. Instead of focusing on how Internet savvy people read a blog think about tools these types of people are more likely to use.

Feedburner Email Subscription

First choice has to be email.

A Feedburner email subscription to your blog sidebar means each time you write a new post almost the entire contents of your post are automatically sent to their email account. Both time saving while providing means of reading your posts that they feel more comfortable with.

You can always get them to subscribe by email when they visit on parent-teacher night!

Here’s how to:

  1. Set up and add Feedburner RSS to your blog sidebar
  2. Set up and add email subscription using Feedburner
  3. Redirects your feed through Feedburner to get accurate subscriber statistics

It’s important to realise that all images and embed such as video are removed in the Feedburner email; so make sure you tell them if you’ve embedded something you want them to check out.

Facebook

Sure this will cause considerable debate 8-) as there are as many reasons for using Facebook as against.  Ultimately it will depend on your situation, who are your intended audience, how you/they use Facebook and how comfortable you/they feel about engaging using Facebook.

One way to add feed from one blog into Facebook is by clicking on Notes and adding your blog feed URL.  This displays your latest posts in your updates.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Please feel free to leave your comments to debate the for/against using Facebook as a means of making it easier for people to read your posts.  Also would love to hear other tips you have for encouraging parents and other teachers to read blogs?

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Ideas For Student Bloggings From….How Do You Do What You Do!

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Said it before and will say it AGAIN! Most great conversations and learning happens in the comments and not the post. But reading all comments on blogs can overwhelming so I thought I would help out.

Here are just some of the ideas I’ve gained from conversations on Student Blogging…..How Do You Do What You Do? post:

Student Login

56js.ca blog has a student login in their right side bar that logs directly to the Write Post area. This means there’s no need for the students to navigate the blog dashboard; they can immediately start writing their posts (thanks Jane Smith and Nathan Toft for sharing).

Here is the link they use http://jsmith.edublogs.org/wp-admin/post-new.php

Student Blogging Responsibilities

Linda Yollis assigns responsibilities such as “fact checkers” and “comment collectors” to her students.

The “fact checkers” are responsible for verifying the facts of a post with the writer(s) before the post comes to Linda to be published. The idea to have “fact checkers” arose from a writer who used the word country instead of county. Linda says she wanted her students to understand that it is important for information be correct for their readers, not because the teacher said so; this makes them take ownership of blog’s credibility. Using “fact checkers” also educates students about plagiarism and it’s not appropriate.

The “comment collectors” are students who are in charge of gathering data about comments; they monitor the number of comments on each post, who comments and if a parent comments. Part of the aim is to encourage students… to encourage their parents.

Make time to visit Linda’s post “How a post gets published on this blog” as it shows, using photos, the processes involved in their class blogging. PS remember to leave a comment to keep the “comment trackers’ busy and include which country you are from!

Building Student Blogging Skills

Mrs. Ilgunas starts her students on a class blog where they learn how to post comments and then progress to their own blogs. Here are the steps she has followed so far on their student blogs:

  1. Starting to blog
    • When students first log into their blogs she gets them to change their blog theme — she says this gets them hooked!
    • Next they go to settings, rename their blog, and if time, write their first post (making sure they know they can write in color if they so choose)
  2. Commenting on each others blogs
    • Leave comments for 3 other students on their blogs. She assigns whose blogs they have to comment on at first to make sure all students receive comments.
    • Add another post.
  3. Learn about Copyright

Daniel Moix shared his write-up of their blogging project including handouts, blog setup guide, project overview, and survey responses of the students afterward.

FINAL THOUGHTS

There are lots of really great comments and conversations on Student Blogging…..How Do You Do What You Do? post. With some explanations of why educators blog with their students. It’s impossible to highlight all these comments here and I recommend you take the time to read through the comments.

Alternatively you could subscribe to The Edubloggers comment feed in your feed reader (here are instructions on how to do this).

Please feel free to leave a comment to tell us “How you do what you do” when blogging with your students. Would love to share more tips and ideas of works well plus challenges you have faced.

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50+ Ways To Create Digital Stories With Students

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Creating stories using web tools is fun and engaging for student while also teaching them new skills. Best of all you can embed them in blog posts to grab readers; including something a bit different makes reading posts more interesting.

Web Tools For Creating Stories

To make the task easier we have Alan Levine‘s 50+ Ways to tell a story. This excellent resource documents how each of more than fifty Web 2.0 tools can be used to create a story using images, audio, and/or video. It has been broken into the following sections:

  1. How to come up with Story ideas
  2. Example of a simple story board
  3. Finding images, audio and video for your story
  4. A review of each Web 2.0 tool – he has reviewed more than fifty tools for creating a story
  5. Examples of the same story created using each of the 50+ tools, with both linked versions and embedded versions

My favorite section is examples of the same story created using each of the 50+ tools because he has a simple review of each and you can check out the example to see if it fits your needs before using it yourself or with your students.

Embedding Stories in Blog Posts

Once you have created your stories it is embedded into blog posts using the same procedure for embedding any HTML code. Here are the steps:

  1. On your blog dashboard, go to Write > Post
  2. Completely write your post adding all text and images including adding your categories, tags and post title
  3. Make sure you tell your readers that you have embedded an object below as many feed readers such as Google Reader may remove it.
  4. Click on Save and View this Post to do any final edits on your post
  5. Go to the story you have created and copy it’s embed code
  6. Go back to the post you are writing and click on HTML Tab
  7. Paste the embed code for your story into your post where you want it to appear then immediately press Publish. (Don’t click on Visual Tab to change back to Visual Editor before hitting Publish)

Image of adding embed code

FINAL THOUGHTS

Would love your feedback:

  1. If you are currently using web 2.0 tools for creating stories – Can you please share your favorite web 2.0 story tools and why you like them?
  2. If you use Alan Levine’s 50+ Ways to tell a story – Please let us know how you go?
    • What worked/what didn’t work?
    • Would love to check out what you and your students create — just leave a link and I’ll drop past and leave a comment.

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Parents Comments Count!

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Comments are incredible motivators for student bloggers. Shame most parents and families rarely leave comments on student blogs.  Yet a thoughtful and encouraging comment from a parent can mean so much to their child.

Can you please leave a comment (or write a post) to share your thoughts and tips:

  1. What do you think are the main reason(s) why families are reluctant to leave comments on student posts?
  2. What strategies do you use to encourage families to visit student blogs?
  3. What methods have you tried to get families involved with commenting on the student blogs?

You might also like to read these comments on my personal blog on reasons why readers mightn’t leave comments on posts and tips for encouraging comments.

Thanks to Jane Smith for the comment “I would love to hear how others are getting families involved in the commenting on their child’s work” which inspired this post!

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Managing Comments and Posts On Student Blogs Using Google Reader

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It’s important, when managing student blogs, to be able to quickly read all their latest posts and any new comments.

Sure you could visit each individual blog but that is incredibly time consuming. The better way, which saves time, is to bring the posts and comments to you using their RSS feed.

Here is how you do it:

1. Set up your Google Reader account

2. Add your student blogs, one at a time, to your Google Reader account by:

  • Clicking on Add A Subscription
  • Entering their blog URL
  • Now click Add

3. Next create a folder and place all the student blogs into the folder by:

  • Clicking on Manage Subscription

  • Click on Change Folder next to the name of any student blog to create a folder for your student blogs

  • Now add all the student blogs to the folder you have created by selecting all the student blogs, clicking More Actions and selecting the name of your new folder

4. Click Back to Google Reader.

5. Now add your student comment feed, one at a time, to your Google Reader account by:

  • Clicking on Add A Subscription
  • Entering their comment feed URL. For Edublogs blog you add comments/feed/ to the end of the blog URL. For example it should look like this http://theedublogger.com/comments/feed/
  • Now click Add

6. Next create new folder for the comments and place all the student comments feeds into that folder by following the same steps you used for the student blogs.

Using Your Google Reader

Now that you’ve set up your Google Reader account all the posts and comments will come to you. As you scroll through the latest feed in each folder they will automatically be marked as read.

To visit a post or respond to a comment — just click on its title!

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