Summary of what I have learnd about blogging

Over the course of this class I have learned that blogging can be a great tool for the teacher to add to their tool box. Blogs used as part of a teacher’s teaching strategies can be a good way to get their students more involved with the material that has been presented in class by having them post comments and respond to their other classmate’s comments. I have also learned that blogs can be a great way to showcase a student’s work to either other students or the child’s parents as both could have access to the blog. I never really thought about it but blogs can be a great way to get or keep the parents involved in their kid’s education.

Work. Blogs require a lot of it to be put in if you hope to make them successful. I think for a blog that is going to be focused on the having your students involved with it the biggest work load would be managing the blog. Keeping things up to date, interesting, and staying on top of all your students posting will require a lot of time. Thankfully the teacher who engages in blogging has many tools available to them to help in managing and sorting through everything that comes along with a blog.

During the course of this class I have also learned about the frustrations of technology. I have been dealing with disappearing comments that I have published on other’s blogs and with my original blog being deleted from Google for some unknown reason. I am glad that this has happened here rather than with a blog that I was using as part of my teaching.

Over all I can say that I have learned a good deal about blogging and what it takes to run one successfully. I also think that I could see myself using one in conjunction with my classroom teaching, the benefits that I have seen and read about I think could be a real positive thing for my future students and for myself.

Blog Marketing

Well, marketing a blog to your students in your classroom would be fairly easy and straight forward as you have a captive audience that depending on what you are requiring of them to do with your blog could be highly motivated to follow your blog. In this case to market the blog you could just explain to the students what it was, how to access it, how to use the features on it, and what benefits they could get out of using it.
Now if your blog was not intended to be used as an extension of the classroom and was geared more towards having your fellow peers read it, comment on it, and learn from it you could and should use a number of different methods to market your blog in hopes that it would receive more views and followers.

One way to market your blog would be to make sure that the content you are publishing is relevant and thought provoking, to do this you may want to focus on issues that are hot buttons in the education community. If you have great content in what you publish your viewers will want to come back and will likely promote your blog for you by talking about what they read or seen on you blog.

Another way to market your blog is to post regularly and keep the posts on topic, the goal here is to keep your viewers wanting to keep coming back so that they can keep up on what is happening. Going along with making regular posts you should do regular maintenance to your blog by removing old and out dated posts and information.
Networking with other blogger is also a great way to spread the news about your blog. You should read and comment on their blogs, link them to your blog and even request that they link back to your blog.

There are services that you could pay to market your blog for you, like Google Adwords or Yahoo search marketing, this can be expensive, so another way to market your blog is to make sure that you have it set up to be able to be pick up by search engines, one good way to do this is to use key words that the search engines will pick up on.

Marketing your blog is a difficult endeavor as there are millions of other blogs you need to find away to make yours standout or fill a hole that is lacking.

Blog management

To have a blog that is useful and interesting takes a lot of work. The best way to handle the work load associated with a blog is to come up with a strategy to manage the blog. The first thing to do is to decide what the intended purpose of your blog is, mine would be to provide a place for my students to come to learn more or discuss their thoughts about a specific topic and it would also be a place where parents could look to see examples of their kids work. Next the individual in charge of the blog needs to establish a time when they will be able to sit down and work on the blog, doing things like adding posts, responding to other comments, and grading any assignment that the students may have posted.

Another important part in managing a blog is learning to use the tools that are available to blogger that help them keep things straight. Tools like the RSS feed option that will notify the blogger of any updates or new posts to their blog or other’s blogs or websites which they are following. Google reader is another good tool to use in blog management; it allows the blogger to read new content as it is being published on your blog. These are but a small sample of the tools available to blogger.

The blogger must know their audience in order to effectively manage their blog. This is important because by knowing their audience the blogger can publish posts that are going to engage their audience and keep them returning to the blog in the future. So it is important in blog management to understand what the audience likes and by doing this the blogger can stay up to date on the subject which their audience seems to enjoy and can publish posts regularly and it a style that the audience seems to respond too.

Managing a blog is a very intensive process and what that is made more manageable by knowing your audience, learning to use the available tools, and by having a clear purpose for the blog.

Canby school district 3rd graders have I-pads in the classroom

I heard a quick blurb on the radio about all the 3rd graders in the Canby school district having I-pads to use in the classroom. All the teachers were raving about how great of a tool they are and how they let the kids create and share their work with others. Seems like technology is taking over completely in the classroom.

I hope the second time is the charm.

Well, this is my second time creating a blog for CSE694, and I hope this one sticks. The first blog that I made for the class had problems form the beginning. It started with my disappearing comment posts, where my comments I posted on others blogs would disappear after a few minutes for no reason. If that was not frustrating enough yesterday when I went to sign in to my blog, I found that I now had no blog. Apparently there had been some security concerns and Google erased my blog, I have yet to figure out what it was that caused them to do it.

Anyways this will be my new blog for the remained of the class, now off to try my hand at posting a lasting comment on someone else's blog.