An insider’s look at how to start a blog

Last week, I promised that using technology in the classroom and starting an educational blog was easy and that all it required was ‘baby steps…’ Just so you know that I wasn’t downplaying the effort needed I’m dedicating this week’s post to giving you a step-by-step run-down on how to create one of your own.

Let’s call this week’s post, ‘Blogging 101’. In it, I’ll omit everything you don’t need to know, so you can get your free and easy-to-use blog up and running as fast as possible.

For the last few years, I have been using ‘Wordpress’, a popular and user-friendly blogging website. I use it for my personal blog as well as to publish academic content on my educational blog.

Since then, I have also realised that while Wordpress continues to work wonderfully for me, there are a plethora of other blogging sites such as — Edulongs, Kidblog, TypePad — that work even better for classroom blogs especially if online student collaboration and group work are crucial elements of your vision.

A simple Google search will direct you to the host of possible blog sites you can use. Each site is unique and offers a range of looks, themes, widgets and settings that you can use to personalise your page the way you want to. All of these are also available as apps for mobile devices making blogging easy, accessible and fun too. So get started.

Step 1:

To set up any basic blog you need to do one rudimentary thing — sign up for an account which is the same as signing up for an email account or onto a social media site like Facebook or twitter. You just need to key in some personal details, select a user name and password, key in some security answers and voila! You’re the owner of a new and ready to use blog!

Step 2:

Customise and personalise your page. Assuming that you will be using this blog for educational purposes, you may want to personalise your page to ensure that your online learning environment is attractive, easy to use and appealing to your students.

Play around with themes, colours, widgets, fonts and other tools made available by the site you have chosen to use. I have found that having interesting things such as quizzes, polls, quotations, pictures or a question for the day running alongside your main post is an engaging way to keep children interested.

Step 3:

Write your first post and set up basic ground rules — this is an important one. Not only is it the first post that your readers will see but it will also set the tone and atmosphere of your online learning environment. You may want to dedicate this first post to addressing a few questions that would probably be on every readers mind.

•Who you are.

•What is the purpose of your blog site.

•How it will benefit the readers.

•Your expectations and ground rules.

Step 4:

Make your blog public and visible — if you are already engaging students on other social media such as twitter, Facebook or even wikis sharing the link to your blog site will become quite simple actually. If not, another alternative is to pass on the actual link to your students. Once they know how to access it, they shouldn’t have a problem coming back the second time around.

Blogging professionally is a completely different ball game and can become a little complicated. I’ve left out all of those details but the internet is replete with every possible explanation to every possible question you may have about it. The four simple steps listed here will help you establish a simple blog to make your presence felt virtually.

Crucial role

In conclusion, I think it the most important thing I can leave you with today is this; the use of online teaching tools does not make a teacher redundant. In fact, the role of the teacher becomes even more crucial when you take the digital leap to teaching-learning on an online forum.

The planning and organisation of your posts are as important as your lesson plans in a traditional face-to-face setting. You are also responsible for the respectful interactions among students on your blog and in their comments to each other — just like you would be in a traditional classroom. Unlike a traditional classroom though, here you shift from being the ‘expert’ to being a ‘guide’ or ‘facilitator’ while your students become the ‘experts’.

For those of you wondering, ‘why go through all this trouble’ let me reiterate what I said in my last post - teaching today does not look, feel or function like it did 10 or 15 years ago. Everything has changed and its ramifications are mind-boggling. Using technology is no longer an educational option. It is a 21st century requirement.

So good luck, get excited and get on board.

Sydney Michael Atkins is an English teacher at the Gems Modern Academy, Dubai.