A Little Error

A pitfall of maintaining multiple blogs simultaneously that I hadn’t discovered: accidentally posting something to the wrong blog. Subscribers may have received a post meant for my baseball team blog on Edumacation. My bad.

Just a quick note on that, though: I’m finding that a team blog is a really effective way to communicate with parents quickly and efficiently, particularly if they know how to use RSS feeds. So far I’ve used our team blog to communicate practice schedules, picture information, important team documents (like spirit wear order forms), and now schedule changes.

I’m starting to think that, in addition to our normal class websites, a class blog might be a neat way for parents to get a regular glimpse into our classroom.

Pump Up Your Blog With Widgets

"We're goinck to pump *clap* you up!"

Last summer, I spent some serious time working on my blog. Much of that time was a response to this blog being mentioned as a “Top 50 Up-and-Coming Teacher Blog” by TeachingTips.com. When I saw that my blog had been mentioned, I had a realization – it was really bland. I looked at some of the other blogs out there, looked at mine, and realized I had some serious work to do – I had to “pump up” my blog. So I spent many hours scouring other blogs getting ideas and settled on some simple yet useful changes that have proven to be very effective.

While a nice new theme and a spiffy custom header helped a lot, the most effective additions to my blog were additional widgets on the sidebar. I thought I would share the most useful and interesting widgets that I found that you can quickly add to your blog and “pump it up” a little bit, much as my friends Hans and Franz did to me a long time ago.

1. AddThis: Probably the most important addition to a blog. The AddThis buttons provide instant subscription and social bookmarking access to any random passersby. While most blog providers have some sort of RSS provision, the AddThis buttons make it obvious and easy to subscribe to your favorite feed reader or add a blog/post to your favorite social bookmarking service.
2. Tags/Categories: Having some sort of tag cloud or category list on the side of your blog is critical to helping readers see what sort of material you post to your blog. If you post mostly on education and technology, your tags will reflect that and having a tag cloud or category list will help visitors recognize if your site will be worth subscribing to.
3. Badges: You do need stinkin badges. The main reason for adding a badge is similar to adding a tag cloud – it identifies the goals of your blog. I added an “International Edubloggers Directory” badge to my site to help achieve this end. Even if your blog doesn’t have a direct purpose, there are flickr badges, YouTube badges, Twitter badges, and who knows what else.
4. ClustrMaps: More of a nifty little tool for the blogger than anything else. ClustrMaps are a sort of visual counter of the visitors that come to your blog. They add “pins” to a small world map that indicate where your visitors came from. This is a nifty little tool to show how international blogging has become and how wide of an audience your blog is reaching – great for a student’s blog, if you ask me! A similar option is Feedjit.
5. Top Posts: One that I haven’t really gotten around to yet, but one that I’ve read is valuable to have is a widget that mentions your best posts. Essentially, it’s an opportunity to showcase the writing that makes your site worth coming back to – it allows visitors to read through a few of your gems and see what your blog is all about at its best.
6. Polls: Another widget I haven’t taken the time to add (but should) is some sort of poll (PollDaddy is probably the most common source). This not only provides you with useful information about your audience and their opinions/ideas, but it also helps them realize that they contribute to your blog (and your thinking). For example, I might post a poll asking if teachers prefer a 4-point writing scale or a 10-point writing scale. Not only would this be useful information for me, but when I post the results and my thoughts on those results, readers will be reminded that they are important contributors to my thinking, as well.

There you have it: 6 widgets that you can use to help pump up your blog. However, as is always the case, no amount of widgets can make people visit – they can only bring back the people who visited to begin with. To learn more about drawing readers to your blog, check out my post on the Top 5 Lessons I’ve Learned About Blogging. Best of luck to you!

Tech Resources for Teachers

"Quiet I'm Thinking" by Grant MacDonald (via flickr)

I’ve posted on some great tech tools for teachers over the last year or so – Wordle, Animoto, Vista’s speech recognition software and others. What I haven’t posted until now is where I get my information, ideas, and tools. In a sense, you’ve been getting the product of my experiences and reflections, but not the process involved in reaching that product. In light of that thought, I thought I would share my top 3 technology resources – the places where I get many of my ideas and tools.

1. Probably my best resources and the one that has helped me the most is Instructify. Instructify is a blog that shares a wealth of technology tools with an education slant. Many of the resources I know about and use in my classroom I have discovered thanks to Instructify.
PROS: Nearly every post contains a great resources; slants toward tools that aid instruction; ideas for literally every content area
CONS: None of note - totally worth reading and subscribing to.

2. U Tech Tips is another great education-focused resource. Jeff Utecht is a Technology & Resource Coordinator at the International School Bangkok. He and other writers on the site post a bevy of wonderful tech resources for educators to use, most of which are immediately applicable.
PROS: focused on education-related tools; offers great resources;
CONS: not all resources applicable for all content areas

3. Though not focused solely on education, Webware is probably a good bet for all things technology, whether news, resources, or tools. I’ve found a lot of cool stuff through Webware’s posts. They spend a lot of time on various additional tools like mobile applications and web startups, which can be both good and bad depending on your needs.
PROS: wide range of tools; extensive coverage of news; constantly updated
CONS: several posts a day can clog up the ol’ feed reader; not a ton of posts that are applicable to teaching and learning

If you’re looking for some nifty tools to use yourself or some really great toys for your students to use, these three blogs are absolute must-reads.

Blog Action Day 2008

Just wanted to pass this along. I’ll be participating with great enthusiasm.

 

I encourage you to sign up and use your blog to help shed light on the critical issue of poverty.

Just to get warmed up, here are a couple of organizations focused on poverty that I really appreciate:

• The ONE Campaign
• WorldVision
• Teach for America
• Peace Corps
• Bread for the World
• CARE USA

Unpublished Posts

Something I’ve recently been experimenting with is not publishing all of my posts (like this one) right away. Initially, the idea hit me when I wanted to write a Voki post but was having trouble getting Voki to load properly (more of a computer issue than a site issue). In the meantime, I had a couple of ideas for posts and wanted to write them, but for some reason I felt weird about posting more than once in a day.

After writing a couple of posts and saving without publishing, I realized a couple of things. First, the pragmatic side of me realized that if I do this when I have time, I can just save posts and then publish them when I don’t have time to write something that day. This way, I keep my blog updated and receiving hits (insert maniacal laugh here).

However, the teacher side of me also realized (thankfully) that this is kind of like what I’ve been reading about in Penny Kittle’s Write Beside Them. I’m still early in the book, but I really liked her idea of having students free write daily to get them writing more frequently and, conveniently, to enjoy it a little more. I did several free writes last year, and I like to write with my students when we do, but doing it every day seemed a little extreme at first.

The way I’m coming to see it, however, is that these blog posts are no different than other writing pieces. When I write something down here, I can save it for later, but I don’t have to share it with somebody right away. Maybe I publish it for others to read a little later, or maybe I just keep it tucked away forever. In any case, it’s an opportunity for me to write down something that I’m interested and engaged in at that particular moment – exactly what Kittle wants her students to do in free writing each day.

Like I said, I’m not all that far into the book (chapter 3 in my note-taking reading and chapter 6 in my straight-through reading), but it is a “teaching writing” book par excellence thus far. If you want to know a little more about it, I recommend checking out huffenglish and JustRead!, both of whom recommend the book highly (plus they’re just great bloggers, too).

Interestingly, one of my drafts (that Voki one, coincidentally) just didn’t seem ready to be published. Go figure.