Is your ‘About page’ helping you or letting your down? Time to check!
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:
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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@Sue Waters, that sounds like a fabulous idea, I don’t mind at all. The tagline of the blog says, afterall, ‘Part of a bigger conversation’ 🙂
It would be great to hear other people’s ideas about the setup – I know the blog backwards so fresh eyes would be able to pick up things I can’t see.
One of the biggest dilemmas I had (other than nutting out the technical how-to aspect of setting up the blog, which just required me to wade through all the help documents) was finding a balance between being fairly prescriptive and allowing for freedom and flexibility which is partly what the collaborative learning process is about. The course I teach has a rigid assessment structure which I needed to adhere to and I also wanted to teach my students sound digital literacy skills surrounding blogging – hence the prescriptive nature of the setup. But I hope that within this structure there’s plenty of room for student thinking, discussion and flexibility to shine through!
@healthstudies, definitely will follow up with a post on it but can’t promise when. Time is always an issue and also need to fit in with other posts I’m writing.
In the meantime you might like to check out the comments on http://theedublogger.com/2010/03/15/formal-style-proper-grammar-and-good-spelling-are-important-in-student-posts-and-comments-do-you-agree/#comments as there are lots of varying thoughts on structure, grammar etc.
Ooops, there’s a typo in the hyperlink – it will still work, just delete the ” that appears at the end of the URL when it opens in your browser and then refresh.
@healthstudies, this is an out there like Sue suggestion. However, there are probably other educators like yourself that would like others to check out how they have set up and to give feedback to help with improvement.
How do you feel about me writing a post on this with a link to your blog and for others to include links to theirs? PS it is okay to say you don’t like the idea 🙂
Well, I’ve now set up my class blog, written an ‘about’ page, established a clear purpose for the blog, written guidelines for students, created blog rules and outlined an assessment rubric. Phew! What an effort!
I’ve even written an example post as a scaffold for my students. Have I gone too far?! Now I just need to get students actually commenting and posting 🙂
Any feedback on the initial setup, my ideas for how the blog will be used and, of course, the ‘about’ page (given that’s what this comment is in response to!) will be well recieved and greatly appreciated.
Here’s the Health Studies blog that I’ve set up for my class.
@Sue Waters,
Thanks so much for your suggestion. I will adapt this concept for my site 🙂
I have a question: Recently, Edublogs has been making me leave my username, email, and homepage when writing a comment (even when I’m signed in…). I was wondering if that is something that I can change, because I don’t want to have to put in my email address every time I leave a comment on someone’s blog… Thanks!
Lauren
Hi Lauren, if definitely shouldn’t be asking for you to sign in. The next time it happens can you go to the Edublogs homepage and check it see if it shows you as logged in (http://edublogs.org/).
@Sue Waters,
That worked! Thank you so much!
~Laurenc604 🙂
@Lauren, glad to hear that worked.
I am currently running a blogging challenge. To sign up, go to the following link:
http://laurenc604.edublogs.org/2009/09/04/big-green-help-challenge/
Sue,
Thanks for the suggestions for the about page in the class blog.I’m going to implement your suggestions to improve our about page in our class blog.
Keep those hints coming.