It’s all about having fun, improving your blogging while connecting with a global audience!

About the Student Blogging Challenge

We’re now into our 3rd Year and 4th Challenge.

We provide weekly tasks for 10 weeks to help you connect with student bloggers in other countries and improve your blogging.

It’s a really great way to learn more about each others cultures!

You can read more about it here:

1. About the student challenge
2. Student Blogging Challenge FAQs

Your blog doesn’t have to be hosted on Edublogs to join.

Students using any blogging platform such as 21classes, Blogger, Blogmeister, Wordpress, Primary Blogger, Creative Blogs etc, can participate!

So far 44 Class blogs from 10 countries (Australia, Argentina, Canada, Hong Kong, Mexico, New Zealand, Normay, UK, United Arab Emirates, USA) have registered.

Register your student blog now!

Follow these TWO simple steps to register:

STEP 1:  Register Your Personal Blog Using the Google Form

Complete the Google Form below by adding:

1. Your Name as First name and initial of Surname
2. Your personal blog URL — for example my blog URL is http://theedublogger.com/
3. Country
4. Your age
5. A few of your hobbies  so other students with similar interests can connect with you

Please Note:

• Please register from home if you can’t see the Google Form on your school network!
• You only need to register once!
• If you are having trouble registering please leave comment on this post so we can help you.

STEP 2: Check your registration details!

Go to the March 2010 student page a couple of days after you added your details to the Google Form to check that your name and blog is on the page.

If your name is not there, it’s probably been removed because your blog URL was wrong.

Please note:

• The delay in adding your information to the March 2010 student page is because we need to check your details before adding.
• If your details haven’t been added please leave a comment on this post with your blog URL so we can sort it out for you!

Final Thoughts

Teachers and class blogs need to register following the steps in Student Blogging Challenge – Time for teachers to register their classes.

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All about having fun, improving blogging and reflective writing skills while connecting with a global audience!

Now into our 3rd Year and 4th Challenge!

We provide weekly tasks for 10 weeks that are like a buffet — you pick and choose what works best for you while we guide you and your students through the process!

Your students don’t need their own blog! You can do the activities using your class blog or by commenting on other class and student blogs.

The Student Blogging Challenge is coordinated by Sue Wyatt and Sue Waters.

You can read more about it  here:

1. About the student challenge
2. Student Blogging Challenge FAQs

Register Your Class!

We’ve opened registration for teachers to register their class to participate in the challenge which starts in March.

We’ll be inviting individual student bloggers to register next week!

Follow these THREE simple steps to register (Teachers Only!):

STEP 1:  Add your email address to our mailing list

Complete the form below.

We’ll be using this to send classes newsletters without Sue Waters or Miss Wyatt having to do separate emails.

STEP 2:  Register Your Class Using the Google Form

Complete the Google Form below by adding your Name, Class Blog URL, Country and Student Age.

Please register from home if you can’t see the Google Form on your school network.

STEP 3:  Check your class details!

Go to the March 2010 Classes page and confirm your class details are correct.

Please leave a comment on Miss Wyatt’s post or mine if you are having any problems or need to ask questions!

FINAL THOUGHTS

We’ll be inviting individual student bloggers to register next week!

Here’s some tasks that will help prepare your class blog for the Challenge:

1. Week 1 – Create A Class Blog
2. Week 2:  Set Up Your Blogging Rules and Guidelines
3. Week 3 – Add A Visitor Tracking Widget To Your Blog Sidebar
4. Week 4 – Add your student blogs to your blogroll
5. Week 5 – Add Students To Your Class Blog So They Can Write Posts

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Yes sounds very vain!  And this is why bloggers normally refer to this as ‘Vanity Alerts.’

I’ll tell you how I do it below — but first let’s talk about why it’s a common blogging practice.

How Vanity Alerts Work

Vanity alerts involve using email alerts and/or RSS feeds to automatically notify you of the use of specific keywords such as your name,  your blog’s name, and your blog URLs in blog posts, news articles, twitter…..

While this seem quite egotistical they are important.

It means you are automatically notified of any conversations relating to yourself, your blog(s) or any posts you’ve written regardless of whether a person has remembered to pingback your post or included you in a @reply on twitter.

My approach is to check all alerts to see what and/or why someone’s written about me, my blogs or a post.  Where appropriate I’ll engage in conversation with the blogger while also using it as an opportunity to build a relationship.

Vanity alerts also useful for:

1. Tracking specific blog posts in terms of how successful they’ve been at generating conversations on other blogs.
2. Monitoring plagiarism and inappropriate use of blog posts.

How To Set Up Vanity Alerts

The easiest way to set up vanity alerts is using RSS feeds in folders in Google Reader.

Here are the tools I use (and why) for my vanity alerts:

#1 Ice Rocket

Ice Rocket is an Internet search engine that specializes in searching blogs.

Other blog search engines commonly used for vanity alerts are Technorati and Google Blog Search. While I use both Technorati and Google Blog Search I prefer Ice Rocket as it’s more reliable.

Setting up Ice Rocket feeds is a simple as:

1. Go to Ice Rocket homepage
2. Add your search term — for your name remember to enclose with quotes
3. Click Search
   
4. Scroll down the search results page to the Subscribe section and copy the Feed URL for the search term 
5. Open up your Google Reader account and click on Add a subscription
6. Paste the Feed URL into the Add a subscription box
7. Click Add
8. And finally to keep all your subscriptions easier to manage – set up a folder in Google Reader for your Alerts

You repeat this process for each search term.  For example I have separate Ice Rocket searches for:

1. “Sue Waters”
2. http://theedublogger.com/
3. http://suewaters.com/

#2 Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a service offered by Google  which provides the option to be notified by email or subcribe by RSS feed.

It offers  six types of alert searches based on what it searches: “News”, “Web”, “Blogs”, “Comprehensive”, “Video” and “Groups”.

I use a ‘Comprehensive’ alert as it includes results from multiple sources (News, Web and Blogs) and subscribe by RSS feed.

Please note, unlike Ice Rocket which immediately returns search results, Google Alerts take time to feed the search results through.

#3 Search Twitter

Search Twitter is a popular tool for monitoring keywords on twitter using RSS.

Using it is simple:

1. Go to Search Twitter
2. Add your search term and click Search
3. Copy the Feed URL for the search term
4. Add the Feed URL to Google Reader same as you did for Ice Rocket

#4 Backlinks

Backtweets is searches links on Twitter (including those that have been shortened) so it really useful for monitoring any tweets that have links to blog or posts (which Search Twitter isn’t very good at).

All you need to do is:

1. Go to Backtweets
2. Add your blog URL and click Search
   
3. Copy the Feed URL for the search term
4. Add the Feed URL to Google Reader same as you did for Ice Rocket

FINAL THOUGHTS

While I’ve shown you how to use these tools for Vanity alerts — you can also use them to monitor any keywords.

For example, you could create an alert on a current news event such as Hurricane Ida so your students can monitor the differences between updates on Web 2.0 compared to traditional media outlets.

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But as a blogger it’s important to know ‘Is the content you’re providing is fulfilling your readers needs?”

Metrics provide you with insights into how your readers are interacting with your content and the type of content that interests them.

Trouble is there’s numerous metrics you can use,  each provides different insight and its meaning depends on what you’re trying to achieve from your posts.

So lets start by seeing how I use one metric, reader bookmarking, to analyze post performance.

My next post will demonstrate how another metric provides different insights.

Types of Posts

As I said the meaning of a metric really depends on what you’re trying to achieve from your posts.

I think of my posts in terms of three main types:

1. Informative - ‘how to’ or information packed posts
2. Conversations – posts that focus on encouraging readers to share their thoughts in comments
3. Sharing – posts that share helpful links

All three types fulfill different readers needs and are an important part of achieving my goal of helping others using technology.

As a general rule informative posts are longer, more likely to be bookmarked and less likely to have a high comment rate.  While conversations posts are normally shorter with more comments but less likely to bookmarked.

Calculating Reader Bookmarking

Reader bookmarking shows the number of readers bookmarking your posts on social bookmarking sites such as Delicious and Diigo.  It provides an indication of how much they value it as a source of information in terms of storing it for later retrieval and sharing with others.

When using this metric I’m looking to determine:

1. What type of posts are being bookmarked?
2. Are specific topics preforming better than others?
3. Are the informative posts achieving my aim?
4. What are characteristics of posts that are highly bookmarked compared to those that are less bookmarked?

I use PostRank because it’s an easy method for determining the number of reader bookmarking per post.

Moving your mouse cursor over a PostRank score displays all their metrics associated with that post including bookmarking on Delicious and Diigo.

Check out how easy this is on The Edublogger’s PostRank page.

Read  my Latest Statistics Say My Blogs Are……? post and comments to learn more about how the PostRank score is calculated.

Top Posts Based on Bookmarking

So here’s the top 20 Edublogger posts based on Delicious bookmarking — the numbers after each post is how many times the post has been bookmarked.

1. 50+ Ways To Create Digital Stories With Students — 117
2. How I Use RSS To Make My Life Easier — 79
3. What Everybody Ought To Know About Podcasting: Part I –77
4. Creating Student Accounts Using One Gmail Account — 73
5. Here’s My First Five Tips For Writing Better Blog Posts — What Are Yours? –73
6. Are You Twittering? Here’s How I Use Twitter — 72
7. Embedding Jing Screencasts Into Blog Posts –71
8. Quick Start Tips For Student Blogging Part I: Setting Up Your Class Blog –59
9. Quick Start Tips For New Skype Users — 59
10. Copyright and Using Images in Blog Posts — 56
11. What Everybody Ought To Know About Podcasting: Part II — 48
12. Here’s My Top Five Mistakes Made By New Bloggers — What Are Yours? — 39
13. Finding and Adding Creative Commons Images To Your Blog Posts — 38
14. Setting Up iGoogle For Your Personal Learning — 37
15. Quick Start Tips For New Flickr Users: Part I — 31
16. Ideas For Student Bloggings From….How Do You Do What You Do! — 29
17. Adding A Voki Speaking Avatar To A Post or Page of Your Blog — 29
18. Managing Comments and Posts On Student Blogs Using Google Reader — 28
19. What Are The Different Roles Of Users? — 27
20. What’s The Difference Between Tags and Categories, You Ask? — 27

Definitely there are posts in the  list that have ranked considerably higher than I’d expect and others that haven’t done as anticipated.

What does it mean?

Not sure but I know my headache is getting worse

So I would love to hear your thoughts on:

1. What topics are readers finding more valuable in terms of bookmarking?
2. What are characteristics of posts that are highly bookmarked compared to those that are less bookmarked?

Meanwhile I feel the headache may continue as I ponder which metric we should look at next?

What is your thoughts?  Page views?  Linking? Comments rate?  And what tool(s) should I use to obtain the metrics?

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I really tried to come up with an idea for this post but I’m totally stuck!

Every blogger knows that feeling.  Especially new bloggers.

Can you help us out by sharing your secrets?

1. Where do you get your ideas for blog posts from?
2. What are your thoughts on how often a blogger should write posts?  And why?
3. What are your tips for maintaining a consistent blogging routine? What works well for you?
4. What other advice would you give to new bloggers?

Image by Caveman 92223 — On the Road Again! licensed under Creative Commons ShareAlike.

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But how many of your readers know how to even leave a comment?  Or what are your comment approval guidelines?  Or how you interact with their comments?

In case you forgot to tell them here are some ways to help your readers.

#1 A Newbie Guide

Providing a guide that includes how to leave comments is always helpful–  not everyone knows how to write comments on posts.  The key is to think what does some one new to reading your blog really need to know.

Here are some examples of Newbie Guides:

1. This is my Info For First Time Visitors! – explains how to subscribe using RSS or email and how to leave comments
2. Michele Martin’s A Newbie Guide to The Bamboo Project – highlights purpose of her blog, what is a blog, how to leave comments, how to participate and important pages on her blog
3. Tony Karrer’s First Time Visitor Guide – purpose of  blog, how to interact and an index of his posts

#2 Commenting Guidelines

Unfortunately not everyone knows what is/isn’t appropriate to write in comments on posts — this is where commenting guidelines can help.

Use your class blog as an opportunity to educate students, parents and other readers on appropriate commenting practice such as:

1. Types of identifying information that is appropriate in a comment e.g. What are your rules about use of last names, IM and personal information?
2. What sort of comments will you approve?
3. What are you looking for in comments?

It’s also worth reminding readers that blogs are works in progress — they need to remember this when writing comments.  Check out how Jan Smith’s does this in the left hand side bar of Huzzah Blog.

Why not get your students to help write the commenting guidelines for your class blog? You might like to also include examples of good and bad comments.

Check out:

1. Lisa Hill’s Mossgiel Park PS Blog Commenting Policy
2. Abbey’s Blog Guidelines for ideas on how a student can add a comment guideline to their blog

Using Pages and Post For Your Information

Approaches taken by bloggers varies.  Some prefer to regularly inform readers on how to comment and/or their comment policy using posts while others use pages.

Larry Ferlazzo uses posts really well to inform readers about commenting.  Here are:

1. His comment policy posts
2. His leaving comments on this blog posts

Bloggers who use pages will either:

• Link to the page in the main navigation — if needed they change the order of their pages
• Or create it as a subpage and link to the page using a text widget

Final Thoughts

Remember I’m looking for examples and ideas to share with others.

Please a comment with links to any ‘About pages’, ‘Commenting Guidelines’ or ‘Newbie Guides’ you create so I can check them out!

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Why? Because your ‘About page’ is important for building your blog’s readership.  Ideally you should review it once or twice yearly!

Editing your Default About page

When you set up a new Edublogs blog it automatically comes set up with an ‘About page’. Readers access this page by clicking on About in the page links at the top of your theme or in the link in your sidebar.

The idea is you change the default text on this about page by inserting your own information — follow these instructions to edit your default ‘About page’

Tips for writing your About page

Writing a good ‘About Page’ is hard.

What’s written on an ‘About page’ and the types of details included is influenced by the type of blog and the intended readers.

Teacher’s personal blog

Start with telling people more about yourself as people are more likely to engage with your blog if they can relate to you as an individual. Then tell them about your blog and the reasons why you blog.

Not too long, not too short, include photos that help readers relate to you as a person.

Here’s my ‘About page’ on my personal blog.

Student blog

Your ‘About page” is like meeting someone for the first time in a new class.  Tell them a bit about who you are and your interests.  You might even want to share reasons why you blog.

Remember you need to be Internet savvy — follow all your teacher’s guidelines!

• Only ever use your first name or a nickname
• Never use any other student’s last name
• Never post personal information such as your home phone number, home address, e-mail address, IM
• Remember online is forever – Don’t write anything you wouldn’t say to your grandmother
• Don’t write anything that could hurt anyone else
• Don’t post photos or videos of yourself unless your teacher and parents have given you permission

Examples of student blogs:

1. Lauren’s About page
2. Abbey’s About page

Class blog

Think about who is your intended audience for your ‘About page’?  Your students, parents/family, or to help connect with other classes?

Below are examples of the type of information you might include for each audience — remember you can add more pages if needed (e.g. a Welcome parents page, blogging rules)

For students and/or parents:

• What is a blog
• The goals of the class blog
• About the teacher(s)
• How to interact with the blog e.g. subscribe to blog, comment on posts, guidelines for writing appropriate comments
• Teacher(s) contact details

To connect with classes in other schools:

• What country, state and city you are from?
• Year (grade level), subject and age groups
• The types of connections your class is interested in e.g. becoming blogging buddies, engaging in global projects
• The type and size of school
• Class or teacher contact details

For an example of a class blog, check out Mr Toft’s.ca ‘Welcome page’

About Page Examples

Can you WOW me with your About page?  I’m looking of examples of great ‘About Pages’ to share with others!

Leave a link your ‘About Page’ in the comments of this post so I can check it out!

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If you’re looking for a quick solution – forget it!

Building your blog’s readership and community takes time.  Here’s my five top tips to get it happening!

#1 Become a Better Blog Citizen

Don’t expect people to read and comment on your posts if you aren’t doing the same on other people’s blogs!  Blogging is as much about reading other blogger’s posts and commenting on posts as it is writing your own posts.

Besides being a valuable source of ideas for writing your own posts it also helps develops relationships with others.   Interaction with other bloggers and their readers, in comments, often leads to new readers of  your blog.

Here’s what you need to do:

1.  Subscribe and start reading other people’s blogs

• Read this introduction on RSS and subscribing to blogs using Feedreaders
• Follow these instructions to set up your Google Reader account

2.  Make an effort to write comments on other peoples blog posts

• Initially leaving comments can be frightening!  But commenting is an important part of blogging.  It’s often where most your learnng happens.
• Comments are about adding to the conversation — not ‘ WOW great post!’
• Don’t comment for comment sake.  Comments should be meaningful, polite, and respond by expanding on the post topic, sharing your thoughts or explaining politely why you disagree.
• If there is an option to subscribe to be notified of new comments — use it!  This way you will be notified of new comments on that post and can choose whether to respond to new comments
• It’s okay to direct comments at other readers as opposed to the blogger.

3.  Respond back to comments on your own blog posts

• Readers like to know you both read and value the comments they leave on your posts
• Responding back in the comments of your post tells both that reader and other readers you value their input

#2 Link to other bloggers

All bloggers like people linking to their blogs and posts.

A good blogger follows the link in a pingback on their post to check out what a person has written about them.  If they like what you’ve written they may leave a comment and even start subscribing to your blog.

It’s good blogging etiquette to link to:

1. A person’s blog if you mention a blogger
2. The post if you are talking about a particular post on a blog

To learn more read:

1. STOP! Don’t Press Publish! Have You Remembered to Add The LINKS?
2. What’s A Pingback? And How To Write Links

#3 Building your Personal Learning Network

Personal Learning Networks (PLNs) are all about using web tools such as blogs, wiki, twitter, facebook to create connects with others which extend our learning, increases our reflection while enabling us to learn together as part of a global community.

Making time to connect with others in meaningful ways will build your blog’s readership.  People who already connect online are more likely to read and interact with your blog than your friends and family who aren’t as connected.

Twitter is currently the most important tool for connecting; especially since many now prefer to obtain links to blog posts via twitter than subscribe using RSS.

• Read this information about building your PLN
• Follow these instructions to set up your twitter account – you can follow me here on twitter

#4 Write better blog posts

Sad fact of life…not every one who sees your blog post reads it.  Even if they read — they often don’t read it all.

To keep your readers attention:

• Every title
• Every paragaph
• Every heading
• Every word
• Every image

——has to count!

Read Here’s My First Five Tips For Writing Better Blog Posts — it’ll help you write better blog posts!

#5 You First, Readers Second!

One of the biggest reasons why new bloggers fail is they focus entirely on writing posts to please readers.  Every post becomes a chore because they aren’t writing about what interest them but what they think interests others!

Write about:

• things you feel strongly or passionate about
• what you’ve learnt — if you didn’t know than it’s likely others didn’t either

Good bloggers always write to fulfil their own needs first because they know by doing so they fulfil the needs of their readers!!!!

FINAL THOUGHTS

These were my five top tips for building your blog’s readership!  What have I missed?  Do you disagree with my advice? What would you expand on?

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Since blogging frequency is a topic that most bloggers struggle with at some stage I thought it’s time we talked about it. And to be honest the key to success is more about a blogging routine than frequency.

How Often Should You Post To Your Blog?

There’s no magic formula when it comes to blogging frequency. Each blog is different and you need to consider what works best for:

#1 Your time commitments

Writing blog posts take time. Sure posts can be quick but posts are just the finished product of the whole blogging process. Researching informations, reading other bloggers’ posts and writing comments are all important aspects of blogging.

Think realistically how much time per week you can commit to blogging.

#2 Your Readers

Your readers are no different from you. They have commitments; limited time for reading posts and mightn’t handle a lot of content per day.

While bloggers often use frequent posts to build subscriber numbers, it can have the opposite effect and alienate readers. There are very few edubloggers whose readers cope with multiple posts per day. Larry Ferlazzo’s Website of the Day and Richard Byrne’s Free Technology For Teachers are great exception due to their type of posts.

Posting several ‘in depth’ lengthy posts on the same day means your readers will probably only cope with the first post and you’ve just wasted the other posts. It’s always better to schedule these types of posts so they publish a few days apart.

Contrary to what many think most readers don’t normally notice decreased posting frequency, and most won’t unsubscribe to your blog for this reason. Good quality content keeps most readers happy. Poor content, with increased posting frequency, won’t!

#3 What you want to achieve

We all have our own reasons for blogging.

If you’re after high reader comment participation you’ll find increasing posting frequency decreases readers interaction. If subscriber numbers are more important; frequent posts may build readership faster.

Developing a Blogging Routine

As I said “the key isn’t frequency but having a blogging routine”.

Make a decision on how many posts per week or month works best for you and then plan your routine to fit this. Every blogger, including myself, goes through periods where they struggle blogging. A routine, combined with your posting frequency, sustains your blogging while also getting you through blogger’s block.

As a general guide -most readers of edubloggers are extremely happy with two good quality posts per week.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Would love to hear about your blogging routine so I could share your advice to other readers. Please leave a comment to tell us about:

• How often do you blog? And what determines your frequency?
• Do you publish your posts on specific days? And if so why?
• What other advice would you give to new bloggers in terms of blogging frequency and routine?

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Are you like me? Do the growing red dots make you want to learn more about all your visitors, their lives, where they live and amaze you with how the Internet has brought us all together?

Pleased to hear because you’ve all got me into trouble! Students are checking closely The Edublogger ClustrMaps as well as their own!

They all want more dots on their ClustrMaps!

Can you leave a comment (or write a post) to share your tips and advice on any (or all) of the following:

1. What are 3 ways for students to increase their blog readership (while also increasing their learning through blogging)?
2. What advice would you give students about writing comments on other people’s blogs?
3. What are some of the aspects of blog etiquette that students need to consider when trying to increase their readership?

HELP: If you are from Madagascar, or know someone who lives in Madagascar, can you please visit (or get them to visit) Sahana’s post and leave a comment! Read her comment here (as svbsky) to understand why I’m asking

FINAL THOUGHTS

ClustrMaps is a “must-have” widget for class and student blogs because it reminds students that they are part of a global audience.

Here are the instructions for adding a ClustrMaps to your blog sidebar using:

1. The ClustrMaps Widget – Edublogs supporters only
2. A Text Widget – free Edublogs users

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