Getting People to Check Your Blog

You can blog all you want, but the real challenge you face is getting people to actually check your blog.

How do you get busy parents and students to check your blog? Here are some ideas to consider:

1. Post important information on your blog so it is worth reading. If you like to write a longer narrative, that's fine, but do make sure the important information jumps off of the page for those who only have time to skim. Skimming is a survival skill for busy parents in the 21st century.
2. Enlist the help of your students. Give them something fun to find on the blog, or provide a small reward every once in a while for checking and ask them to show the blog to their parents.  View Question of the Week  in the sidebar of this blog.
3. Use a form to have them check in, then give them a special privilege or positive comment. (Something small, but fun!)
4. Use jokes, riddles, interesting facts, or anything that might get them checking.
5. Send a quick blog update message to parents, so they know when to check.

Look in the sidebar of this blog for ideas of ways to get them to check your blog.


Sample:

Comments

Blogs are meant to have comments and bloggers expect to be able to comment on a blog. Many blog authors are weary of enabling comments because they don't necessarily want everyone's opinions displayed on their blog, but this is something that can be managed with a bit of attention to blog setup. This means you can allow anyone to submit a comment to your blog, but each comment needs to be approved by you before it is posted. The whole process is quite efficient. You can set it up so you receive an email every time someone submits a comment to your blog. Then, you can approve or reject the comment.

Reasons to allow comments:

1. Visitors to your blog probably expect to have the opportunity to provide you with feedback. 
2. It can be enlightening to receive a comment. That way you know someone out there is reading your blog, and people often leave good and useful suggestions.
3. Parents viewing your blog can quickly respond to something they've just read and that keeps the communication flowing. If you would prefer to communicate with parents privately, you can say so in the comments message box, and move the conversation to the privacy of email, then just reject the comment and email the parent instead.
4. Opportunities for students to express themselves  through blog comments are exciting and provide teachers with all kinds of "teachable moments" to help students fine-tune their writing skills. Students love writing for an audience and they are motivated to publish something worth reading.
5. Teach students about Internet-safety by asking them to comment.

If you want to enable comments and comment moderation on your blog so it works the way you want it to, all you have to do is follow the directions found in the sidebar of this blog. Feel free to copy and paste the comment message samples provided on the handout right into your own blog or modify. The comments samples are the result of collaborative efforts to establish good, safe blogging that works!

Click the comments link below to view some suggested guidelines for students and to see how commenting works..

Step-by-step directions are available "Handouts" in the sidebar of this blog.

Publish Handouts: Google Docs

GoogleDocs offers an easy way to publish handouts on your blog. You are sure to appreciate the ease of using GoogleDocs instead!

A word of caution about publishing handouts: Please be careful about what you publish on the Internet. You can publish any original work you create, or the work of others with permission, but you can't just publish other people's work. If you want to direct your readers to a file that someone else has posted on the web, all you have to do is create a link to it, but please do not download someone else's file and upload it to GoogleDocs for publishing; that's not legal. If you purchased a workbook and you want to post a page from it online, forget about it. Most likely you purchased the rights to share the contents of the book with your students, but not to share the contents with the world.  The same is true with textbook materials; they can't be shared with the world.

Keeping the copyright rules in mind, I strongly encourage you to try publishing a GoogleDoc you create and linking it to your blog. Parents and students will appreciate being able to locate important handouts with ease, and you can save yourself the time and trouble of all that printing.

Step-by-step directions for performing this task from start to finish, are linked in the sidebar.  Click on Looking for a Handout?