How to blog without adding to your workload

Through my blog platform, Creativeblogs.net, I now have some 20 schools with multi-user blogsites, mostly here in the northwest. When a school signs up to the service, one of the most common questions I get asked by teachers (some of whom were not party to the decision to go with a blog platform) is, “How will it affect my already heavy workload?” This is a perfectly legitimate question to ask, and one which I will attempt to answer in this post.

The first thing I would say is that none of the following points are likely to persuade anyone unless you are willing to give it a go. The actual mechanicals of getting a piece of writing published on a blog are ridiculously simple, and, like all software, you do need to spend a short period of time familiarising yourself with the basic features of your chosen blog platform (in the case of Creativeblogs, it’s Worpress MU). Once you are happy with the basic wordprocessor controls of your class blog you are ready to start blogging with your class - and remember I’m trying to show you how you can do this without adding to your workload.

Shared Writing

Wherever possible, use your blog to work on shared writing sessions with your class. You are planning to do a shared write anyway, so do it on your blog. And, by doing it on the blog you can get extra benefits:

• A new published piece of work with no extra effort;
• Go back to it in the future and edit or add to it;
• It’s online for a later session when your class might be working on laptops or in an ICT suite;
• Structure a homework task around the post by asking children to comment at home. Perhaps by writing the next paragraph of the story; giving their point-of-view; writing their own verse or poem etc;
• By “tagging” each shared write according to its genre (science-fiction, autobiography, argument, chronological report etc) you can quickly build up an index of searchable resources to use in future.

What have we learned this week?

Once a week get a small group of children (possibly with a TA) to reflect on the week’s work and what they have learned. They can also mention any special projects, who has had class rewards etc. Again, this gives other children the opportunity to respond, and it’s amazing how often children will visit a class blog and add a comment on how much they have enjoyed a particular activity.

Put homework on your blog

The preparation and marking of homework can be really tedious and time consuming, so try and make it fun and interactive by using your class blog. Posting videos from Teachertube is incredibly quick and easy (instructions here) and adding links to educational websites such as the lovely Tutpup is also really simple. Tutpup has the added benefit of being a fun and competitive way to learn tables and spelling while giving you, the teacher simple feedback to see who is actually having a go. Don’t forgot to also structure homework tasks around your shared writes as mentioned above.

The basic principle is to find tasks that you have to do anyway and see if you can think of a constructive way you can do this via a class blog. The easiest way of doing this is to structure tasks around the shared write/pupils feedback via a comment approach which can work for loads of different contexts, not just literacy.

Remember, blogging is a habit: once you do it regularly enough it becomes second nature. With a little bit of effort in getting to know how to publish stuff on your blog you will be very surprised how quick and easy it becomes I’m reminded a little when interactive whiteboards were introduced - a lot of teachers felt threatened and were way outside of their comfort zones with all this new hardware in their classroom. Nowadays I’m really surprised when I go into a classroom and I don’t find a whiteboard in it. I’d like to think that it could be the same with class blogs, after all, what better way is there to demonstrate the excellence that goes on in your classroom.

Special Offer on Creativeblogs.net

Until the end of the summer term schools can order a multi-userblogsite from Creativeblogs.net and get their training half-price (£250 instead of £500). Simply contact  john at creativeict.co.uk for more details.

Schools with blogs powered by Creativeblogs.net

Click on the tags to find a link to their blogsite.

This timeline is created using Dipity . Simply create your timeline, then, in “Timeline View” click on the embed button and copy the iframe embed code (labeled as “Regular Embed”). Paste into the html tab of the Wordpress MU visual editor and publish.

This timeline is an automatic creation using feeds from this blog, and from Twitter (I’m HGJohn on Twitter if you want to follow me). I did this just to show how easy it is to display a timeline, however Dipity Timeline’s real worth is as a curriculum tool where a group of children might research and edit a timeline on whatever topic they might be doing - the timeline displayed in the blog post will grow as the children add to their work.

Quikmaps is an excellent Google Maps mashup that allows users to easily add their own edits to a map. The map below shows a map of all schools that use Creativeblogs.net for their school’s blogsite. I’ve simply dragged a tag on to the correct location for each school, and since Quikmaps supports html code, I’ve added a link to the tag in the following form:

<a href=”schoolwebaddress“>Title of link</a>

The “schoolwebaddress” is the full URL, including the http://, and the “Title of link” is whatever you want to display in the tag.

As well as adding links to the tag, you can also add images. To link to an image, the image must first be hosted online somewhere e.g. Photobucket, Flickr or Phanfare, to name but three photo hosting services (check to see if any are blocked in school). Once you’ve got the image hosted online, you simply need to find the URL for that image and embed it into the Quikmaps tag using the following form:

<img src=”imageurl“>

Again, “imageurl” includes the http://. Note that it is important to save the image on your chosen service in the size you wish it to display on your Quikmap (usually a thumbnail size image is best).

Possible uses for Quikmaps in the classroom:

• Practically every Geography lesson you can think of;
• Locating places for history lessons;
• A litter survey of your school grounds (zoom in really close and click on satellite view, then add tags for where you found litter);
• Residential courses - plotting routes of walks, nature surveys etc;
• Plotting routes to school of Walking Buses;
• Locating amenities in your community (go on a community walk with a digi camera and add the photo tags to a Quikmap;
• The list is endless…

I’m now starting my 4th year as an independent ICT consultant. It’s about time I pulled everything I do into one place, so this presentation is a summary of all the products and services I offer. Please take a few moments to flick through it, and don’t hesitate to get in touch if you’d like more information about anything mentioned.