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| Example of unique titles |
Creating a successful student blogging experience requires some careful planning, thoughtful promotion and regularly supporting other class blogs out on the web. Like any website, your visitor's first impression will either determine if they stay. I find that one detail that piques my interest is the titles of posts. Make sure that each student's title is unique. That way they will each stand out. Another benefit of this is that we are teaching our students how to write persuasively. Creating a catchy, inviting title is difficult and when done effectively utilizes many higher order thinking skills.
Multi- Media
Another technique we use is to add a student created multi media artifact to each post. It could have
drawings, or a
photo, or a
video. In each example the student has added another layer of understanding to their post and made the readers experience more interesting. Anything that adds to the interesting nature of the post is encouraged, this includes various styles of writing like drama, humor and science fiction.
Promotion
Getting student's work out to a broader audience can be deceptive. The skills that get more readers and comments are nuanced. It is important to respect your network and not flood them with pleas for visits and comments. I believe that this is especially important as we want to model self respecting online behaviors ourselves and refrain from the "follow for follow" mentality that can be found among young people today on major social media networks.
Support Others!!
This is the most important thing you can do when developing your student's network of blogs they read and comment on. As the teacher I like to follow a 1/2 rule:
Modeling support for other classes that are blogging is what will improve our online experience and help build your network at the same time. It can be counterproductive to push too many requests for comments out to your network or hash tag and will turn readers away from your class blog in the future. How do you promote your class blog and student writers? Please share your ideas and techniques so that together we can continue to inspire the writers of the future- today's student bloggers.
