Use Scheduling to Blog Consistently
Earlier this week I hosted a webinar about creating and maintaining classroom blogs. One of the topics that I addressed during the webinar was the importance of publishing blog posts on a consistent schedule. Publishing consistently helps your students and their parents know when they should expect to see new entries appearing on your blog. […]
SpeakPipe Has New Customization Options
SpeakPipe is a great little service that lets you collect voice messages from visitors to your blog. I used it for many years on a classroom blog so that parents could leave voice messages by just clicking the “send a message” button on my blog. I could then either listen to the message or read […]
How to Export, Save, and Re-purpose Your Edublogs Posts
As the end of the school year approaches you might find yourself wondering what to do with all of the blogs posts your students wrote during the year. If you used Edublogs for your classroom blog, there is an easy way to export and save a copy of all of those posts. Follow these steps […]
The Services I Recommend for Classroom Blogging Today
I started blogging with students twelve years ago. I started this blog eleven years ago. Over that time I’ve seen a lot of new blogging services pop-up and disappear a few years later. But there are two services that have stood the test of time that I recommend today whenever someone asks me which service […]
How to Include Podcast Episodes In Your Blog Posts
The folks at Edublogs were kind enough to share my list of ten classroom podcast ideas with participants in their Better Blogging With Students course as well as with all of their Twitter followers. This morning I asked the Edublogs folks if they were allowing the embedding of Anchor episodes into blog posts (Edublogs hasn’t […]
Managing Classroom and Student Blogs
One of the questions that I am frequently asked about blogging and have included in my webinar on the topic is “do you recommend that I have just one blog or should all of my students have their own blogs?” There is not a clear cut answer to this question because the answer depends upon […]
How to Create a Great Classroom Blog – Webinar
As I mentioned last month in Get to Know Free Technology for Teachers, one of the ways that I keep this blog running is through hosting professional development webinars. I pick webinar topics based largely upon what you suggest to me throughout the year. One of the suggestions I’ve received many times in the last […]
A Blogger Privacy Setting You Might Want to Use
Blogger can be a good choice for many classroom blogs. One of its selling points for schools that use G Suite for Education is that students can log-in by using their school-issued Google Accounts. Another great aspect of Blogger is that you can get a blog started in a manner of minutes. But with that […]
Edublogs Publishes a Report on the State of Educational Blogging
Edublogs, a popular student blogging service, recently published the findings of their annual survey to gather feedback from teachers, students, and school administrators about their use of educational blogs. This year 688 people completed the survey, down from 777 last year, but up from the 587 two years ago. Sue Waters wrote a detailed report […]
7 Blogging Tools for Teachers Compared and Ranked – Updated for 2017
One of last year’s most popular posts featured my chart comparing seven popular blogging tools for teachers and students. Given the recent update to Edublogs I thought it was time to update my chart and rankings of blogging tools for teachers and students. You can view the chart here as a Google Doc or as […]
Edublogs Now Offers Pro Features for Free!
Edublogs is a blogging service designed for classrooms. For the last four or five years many of the services that they offered were only available to people who subscribed to the “Pro” version of Edublogs at a cost of $39.95/year. Most of those “Pro” features will be available for free beginning today. The Edublogs Pro […]
5 Common Classroom Blog Mistakes
A classroom blog can be a powerful tool for improving communication with parents, for building a sense of community amongst your students, and for creating a record of what you and your students have learned throughout a school year. But you can only reap these benefits of classroom blogs if you maintain the blog and […]
A Glossary of Blogging Terminology
The start of the new school year isn’t far for many teachers now. It is at this time of year that I find myself helping teachers get classroom blogs started. Once you’ve chosen the best blogging tool for you and your students, sometimes the next challenge of running a blog is just knowing the terminology […]
5 Reasons to Have a Classroom Blog
Earlier today someone wrote the following in response to my post featuring a good example of a teacher and student blog, “Franklly (sic) I don’t want to blog with my students. I want to talk with them face to face in class.” While I appreciate that the person who wrote that comment on Facebook wants […]
How to Create a Classroom Blog on Weebly for Education
Weebly for Education offers a good platform for creating a classroom blog. One of the perks of Weebly for Education is that you can create and manage your students’ accounts from one central dashboard. Weebly for Education also offers all of the great templates and content management tools that has made Weebly one of the […]
How to Create a Classroom Blog on SeeSaw
A couple of weeks ago SeeSaw introduced an option to create a classroom blog within your SeeSaw account. SeeSaw’s blogging tool allows you to create public or private blog to share with students and their parents. In the video embedded below I demonstrate how to create a blog on SeeSaw.me The videos below demonstrate how […]