3 Series on Blogging: 5 ways to get into the groove

1. Read Blogs That Interest You. Use Google’s Blog Search to find a blog that interests you. Or you can use the Technorati search engine for blogs, which is really blog central. Check Blog Pulse to search a particular term and see the blogging trends. Read a few blogs that are in your interest area - get your student to read a blog in their interest area, and blogs of other students. You will see that people write about anything that means anything to them and there is someone out there who is interested in reading it.

If you’d like to know how you can subscribe to blogs and get new posts delivered to you rather than checking several sites for new stuff, watch the RSS in Plain English video from The CommonCraft Show. Or you can check out my very first post on technoLOTE called Introducing the Web 2.0 World.

2. Decide what type of blog you would like to have. There are NO RULES! There are many different types of blogs. If writing often is not really your thing, you could have a photoblog where each post is a photo rather than text, or a blog of your students’ artwork or completed maths problems with short descriptions. You might want to check out this post on different types of weblogs.

3. Get into the habit. Blog about anything and everything and regularly - whether that be once a week, every couple of days, or every day if you’re really keen. Start thinking about how you can turn opinions, events, conversations, and discoveries into blog posts. Make a time for your blogging (amongst all those other things you have to make time for - I know). There are many benefits to reap from it, one of the greatest being the network and community you can build around your blog. More on that in the next installment of this 3 Series.

4. Plan some blog posts. I often do this - not to say that my posts always work out to plan - but I usually have some idea. Doing a bit of planning helps you to focus your reading a bit more and starting to think of things that you can write about. Just as there are different types of blogs, there are different types of blog posts. Darren Rowse of Problogger wrote a post on 20 different types of blog posts which is definitely worth checking out.

5. Keep it up. Rather than thinking ‘I have a blog, but nothing to write on it really’ or ‘Why would I have a blog? What would I write on it?’ It’s important to realise that YOU DO HAVE SOMETHING TO OFFER, and so do your students. It’s so easy to be reluctant to blog about something, or to ask someone a question. It is so easy to just assume that you have nothing to offer because someone else has already written about it or because you don’t feel as though you know enough. Blogging is not about being an expert. It’s about self expression and reflection, and generally just having a go. Again, a great network can be built around your (and your students’) blogs.

I’d love to hear your blogging stories, so please leave them in a comment or email me jess (@) technolote DOT com

(I write my email address like this so that spammers don’t find it!)