Need Some Classroom Blog Ideas? Try These Edublogs Resources
For years Edublogs has hosted a list of active classroom blogs. The purpose of the list to offer a place for teachers to find examples of classroom blogs and potentially find blogging buddies for their students. Anyone who has an active classroom blog can add their blog to the list regardless of whether or not […]
How to Customize Your Edublogs Favicon
A couple of weeks ago I published a video about how to customize the favicon on Blogger blogs. Since then I’ve answered a few emails from readers who wanted to know if the same is possible in Edublogs. Yes, it is possible to customize the favicon icon for Edublogs blogs. The process of doing this […]
How to Remove the Default Navigation Bar on Blogger Blogs
Blogger provides anyone who has a Google account with a quick and easy way to start a blog. I have been using it for more than a decade for a variety of blogging projects and I’ve introduced it to many teachers over the years. The question about Blogger that I am asked more than any […]
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. […]
Today’s Blogging Q&A Recording
This afternoon I hosted a live Q&A session about blogging. I used YouTube’s relatively new desktop livestreaming tool for the broadcast. If you missed the broadcast, you can watch the recording as embedded below. A list of the questions that I answered is included below the video in this post. How do I get started? […]
Edublogs Publishes a Guide to Mobile Blogging
Edublogs, one of the two services that I recommend for classroom blogging, has published a free guide to blogging on mobile phones. Edublogs recently deprecated their free mobile apps and now recommends three other ways to post to your Edublogs blog from your phone. The three methods that Edublogs now recommends for blogging on your […]
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 […]
10 Blog Post Ideas for Your School Blog
“I don’t know what to write about” is one of reasons that many people cite for not regularly updating their school or classroom blogs. One of the ways that teachers and principals can avoid running out of blog post topics is to think about the questions that parents frequently ask during parent-teacher conferences or during […]
Three Countdown Calendars For Your Classroom Blog
In my workshops about developing blogs and websites for classrooms I always make the point that you should add some content that will appeal to all students and parents when they visit the homepage. This content can include links to handouts, a calendar of due dates, and current announcements. Another item that you can add […]
SpeakPipe – Collect Voice Messages Through Your Blog
SpeakPipe is a great tool to add to classroom blogs. SpeakPipe allows you to collect voicemail messages through your blog. With SpeakPipe installed on your blog anyone can click on the “send voicemail” button and leave a message for you. When a visitor clicks the “leave voicemail” button she will be prompted to allow access […]
Why You Should Write Evergreen Blog Posts
The two reasons for giving up on a blog that I hear more than any other reasons are, “I don’t have anything to write about” and “no one is reading my blog.” Focusing on developing evergreen blog posts can help you solve both of those problems. An evergreen blog post is a post that will […]
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 […]
Twelve Posts from One Topic
One of the most frequently cited reasons for discontinuing a blog that I hear is “I don’t have anything to write about.” Said another way, “I’ve run out of ideas.” Keeping your blog fresh does require coming up with a lot of blog posts topics. A method that I regularly use to develop blog post […]
Why You Should Try to Use Video on Your Blog
This morning Isla and I posted a short video on YouTube to explain why you should try to include videos in your blog posts. Using videos in blog posts helps to keep visitors on your blog longer. For teachers and school administrators, adding a videos to your blog is a good way to show students […]
Padlet Now Offers Commenting on Notes
Padlet is one of my favorite all purpose ed tech tools. With Padlet you can create a place to collect digital exit tickets, a place for collaborative brainstorming, a place to create digital KWL charts, a place for collaborative bookmarking, and even a place to create a simple classroom blog. My YouTube channel contains a […]
16 Things You Can Do To Add More Functions to Your Classroom Blog
After you have identified some goals for your blog and created its basic framework, you’ll might find yourself asking, “what else can I do with my blog?” There are lots of third-party functions that you can add to most blogs. I like to add the Remind widget to classroom blogs. Similarly, most blogging platforms have […]
5 Formative Assessment Tools You Can Embed Into Your Website or Blog
Earlier this week I had a chat with a teacher about the role of formative assessments in his classroom. As most of my conversations about education do, our chat eventually drifted into the various formative assessment tools that we’ve tried over the years. One thing that I’ve always tried to do when selecting formative assessment […]
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 […]
5 Benefits of Having a Classroom Blog
1. Being authors on a blog gives students the opportunity to share their thoughts with you, their classmates, and their parents on a longer timeline than is typically feasible during a school day. Not every student is going to be able to quickly articulate his or her thoughts during a face-to-face conversation with his or […]
7 Tools for Creating Classroom Blogs
After I published last night’s post on reasons to have a classroom blog, a handful of people contacted me for recommendations on which blogging platform to use. The answer isn’t always clear cut as every teacher has his or her unique classroom dynamics to account for in making a choice. That’s why earlier this year […]
Three Ways to Generate Topics for Your School’s Blog
Posting new content on a regular basis is one of the best ways to get parents to frequently check your school, library, or classroom blog. Coming up with blog post topics is the struggle that many people have in attempting to regularly update their blogs. At times, I have that problem too. I have three […]
7 Blogging Platforms for Teachers Compared and Ranked
Last week I published an updated version of one my popular ed tech tools comparison charts. That chart was about creating multimedia quizzes. This afternoon I updated my chart of seven blogging tools for teachers. The chart is available as a Google Doc or as a PDF embedded below. Unlike some of my other charts, […]
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 […]
SeeSaw Now Offers a Simple & Safe Blogging Platform for Kids
SeeSaw is a great digital portfolio tool for students and teachers. It works on all devices including iPads and Android tablets. The service allows students to draw and annotate items in their digital portfolios. In the SeeSaw iPad app students can talk while drawing on pictures in their portfolios. Today, SeeSaw launched a blogging function. Now you can […]