As a teachers writing online, there are certain considerations that don’t normally come into play in a typical writing classroom. You may choose to write teaching-centered posts for your blog, as many prominent teacher bloggers have done. How much we allow our teacher selves and your private selves to overlap is up to each of us. However, it’s more than likely that you’ll want to keep your identity private. Because of this, I’ve put together a few things to consider before diving into your first blog post.
- Create an alternate identity. Many teachers keep professional blogs, and in most school districts here in Georgia, updating a class blog has become a mandatory part of the job. But this is not the kind of writing you’ll be asked to do for KMWP. Because you may be asked to publish personal narratives, publish opinions about current events, and experiment with blogging with an attitude of play, you’ll want to create a sort of fiction, giving yourself the good fortune and distance of a character self, an avatar, psuedonym or pen name. This can free you to write honest and real without the unintended consequences that can sometimes befall teachers writing online.
- Remember your goal. While the assigned purpose of your blog is to experiment with gaining an audience using an online publishing medium, how you gain that audience is almost entirely up to you. Select topics that you find interesting, confusing, infuriating, hilarious, or strange. Choosing topics from the news media is a good place to start, but you might also write about your own life, past, present, or future.
While writing online has certain risks, participating in the process of writing for a real-world audience opens us up as learners and gives us a sense of the risk our students take when writing in our classrooms. When done with careful planning, guidance, and tiered writing practice, opening up the classroom to the (potentially) global audience that a blog can attract has the potential to motivate even the most reluctant writer to publish quality work.
Tips for beginning bloggers:
- Start slow. Remember the tortoise and the hare? It is the slow and (for some) anxiety ridden climb up that first tall hill that must occur before any real work happens. Don’t try to do everything at once. Work on mastering one skill at a time and celebrate your accomplishments. Keep focused on small, manageable goals and work at your own pace.
- Remain anonymous. Or not. Decide early on what level of privacy you’d like to maintain for your blog. If you’re not sure, it’s better to err on the conservative side at first. One way to maintain your voice while preserving your identity is to develop an online persona. Create a pseudonym, pen name, secret identity and/or avatar as a stand in for your real name, picture, and information. Whether this is your first blog, or your 50th, the goal is to experiment with gaining an audience. Many inexperienced bloggers blur the line between personal and public, only to regret their decision later on. Make sure you consider how the words, images, and other content you post can be manipulated and shared before you post.
- Trust your process & be patient. Although blogging is essentially a publishing platform, most people need to go through some sort of re-visioning process before their words are ready to publish. Start with paper and pencil, a journal, an open Word document, or type right into your WordPress editor and save a draft. Whatever works, as long as you get a chance to set aside your words (even if it’s only for an hour) and look back at them again with fresh eyes before you publish.
- Experiment. Conquer your fears, if you have any, and stumble around until things work. You will not break your blog by pushing buttons or clicking around. Test things out. Click and see what happens. Do a “test” post before trying something new (you can always delete it later) Most of all, preview your blog post and make sure any links, videos, or other embedded media, work the way you want them to before you publish.
- Remember the human. One of the keys to developing a strong online writing voice is the ability to consistently hold in mind an imagined audience. Does your reader drink the morning coffee and have a cat? Do they argue with their mother (or mother-in-law) about how to raise the kids? Do they hunt deer on Sundays with Pop and Curtis? The more specifically you can imagine (or create) your imagined sense of audience, the stronger and more interesting your writing voice will become.
- Phone a friend (the Internet). Don’t know how to do x, y or z? Online tutorials abound. Do a basic search for “how do I _________ ” (you fill in the blank) and chances are, the answer is only a click away to teaching yourself the in’s and out’s of blogging.
Intermediate/advanced skills to work on:
Just because your words are online, doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll garner interest. Although blogs and other online writing platforms are public and have the potential to be easily shared, most personal efforts at blogging often go unnoticed because they do not make use of the built-in tools to attract an audience.
The key word here is “potential”; in physics (and in students), potential energy is the ability of a system to do work due to its position or internal structure. As any teacher (and parent) can tell you, just because the potential to do work exists, doesn’t mean work will happen.
Just like the thrill seeking riders on a roller coaster, students want instruction in writing that is carefully engineered to build momentum, keep them (and others) safely in line, and most importantly, provide them the ability to choose the amount of risk they want to take.
- Reciprocity. Commenting on and speaking about other blog posts can draw people to yours. Seek out others who are writing about the same topics, and leave them a comment with a link back to your post. You’ll be surprised how quickly you gain a wider audience by using this strategy, just make sure to steel yourself against naysayers and opponents, and follow the golden rule when leaving comments for others.
- Searchability. Use tags & high frequency words. Search engines use tags and keywords to pull up sites that match your search. Use words in your post title that are most likely to draw people to your blog through an online search, or add tags, which allows others to search your blog for posts on specific topics.
- Relevance. One of the best ways to gain an audience for your blog writing, is to write about current events and other high interest topics, while adding your own, unique point of view to the topic.
- Connectivity. Make good use of hyperlinks within your text. Don’t merely copy and paste a long and clunky web address into your post; choose key words and highlight them by including a link to other articles, posts, and other media (such as videos, images, and audio) you find online.
- Transformation. How can you manipulate existing online information to suit your needs while still providing a reference to the original? This is really a more advanced skill, and when done effectively, can really drive reader interest and commentary. With manipulation of existing media, however, comes the responsibility to be ethical and accurate. Make certain your choices are intentional and purposeful.
