Running a Successful Class Blog

I have been running Creative Blogs for nearly three years now and there are over 20 schools mostly based in the Northwest using the service (hosted Wordpress MU). One of the biggest issues for any school taking on an institution-wide blogsite is that there is an extremely wide range of awareness and skills amongst teachers in working online. Sometimes the decision to implement a site has been taken by a small group of decision makers, and this can create its own tensions. Sometimes staff feel already under pressure with time and targets and starting a school blog project might be just another straw on an already creaking camel’s back. I strongly believe that a well run school blogsite can offer tremendous benefits to a school community and the way in which it communicates and learns, without necessarily impacting significantly on workload.

In order to help teachers new to the medium I’ve decided that this summer’s project will be to compile a guide to running a succesful classroom blog. I’m hoping that members of the Creative Blogs Community as well as other educational bloggers will add their thoughts to a wiki I’ve set up for the purpose. I’ll edit the results into a paper and make it freely downloadable to all and sundry under a Creative Commons share and share alike license. Hopefuly it will be of use to individual teachers setting up their own blogs, or to schools wanting to run a campus project.

I would appreciate contributions to the wiki, no matter how small; please email  john at creativeict.co.uk for a password.

At the moment it’s a blank canvas, but I’ll start adding structure over the next few days.

Creative ICT’s Zoho wiki

Thanks,

John