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Organize
Week 2 Edublogs Blogging Challenge helps me think about my students and other readers. What will they need to know and want to know?
How do families and students know what to do with a blog?
Set up pages, which are separate from posts, to share that information that stays the same. Pages are static — they are always there. Posts change with the new information you add.
What pages are needed?
For my blog, I’ve revised a little bit. I’ve added a Contact page under the About Page. That way, visitors easily learn who we are and can contact us quickly.
To explain to visitors and families why we blog, I revised my “Why Blog” page, which is also under “About.”
To remind students of our guidelines, I’ve got the rules right in the sidebar and in the guidelines, which are pretty detailed to clarify what our writing class and blogging expects. Many links to Internet Safety are provided; we spend time on this weekly, if not daily.
To explain to families what we’re doing and why, see the “Family” page. It’s a brief explanation of blogging, and also shares links to our blogs and how to use the blogs, including how to comment. A downloadable file is included.
Finally, I updated the Ideas, Discussion, and Tech Tip pages. I always thought I’d need to add to the Tech Tip page, but students just seem to help each other and figure out any issues. But students sometimes need ideas for blogging, so both the Ideas page and Discussion page provide ideas. I will be adding to those.
I also added the “Subscribe” button, just below the Cluster Map. I moved the Search to the top. I like the Search button there because frequent users can quickly search for the content needed.
That feels good: organized blog content
How about you? What did you add to personalize the content for your readers’ needs? Is there anything else I should include?
Hi Sheri
You’ve been working really hard during your summer break!
Apologies in advance for the long comment but I had lots of thoughts I’m pondering.
One thing I do with our custom menus is use a static top item if I have sub-menus. The concern is that reader may not realise the top item is a page whereas if you add the first item as the submenu they can’t miss it. If you look at the custom menu on the Teacher’s Challenge blog you will see we use this approach. To be honest I’m not sure if it does or doesn’t help but both Ronnie and I use this approach because we both feel it helps. Let me know if you wanted to try it and I’ll make the change to your custom menu.
Love your ideas page for topics to blog about! I’m going to add a link to it on our page on setting up blogs – http://teacherchallenge.edublogs.org/step-11-set-up-student-blogs/ under Getting started. Hope that is okay?
I’m wondering if your Discussion page is the best option? I notice you’ve set up a forum. I’m not sure this will be ideal for your students for two reasons: 1) you can only post in a forum as a logged in user 2) forums don’t support threaded comments. If all your student blogs were on Edublogs then a forum might be worth considering but if most of your student blogs are on kidblog then it might be better to set up a post for discussions and add a link into your custom menu? Have you read about the new changes to how you can read posts using the Reader and moderate directly in the Reader? We will be publishing a post in more detail soon but you can read how to use it with students here – http://teacherchallenge.edublogs.org/step-11-set-up-student-blogs/
I would also consider turning off comments on some of the pages. The main one would be the contact form page because it can confuse them as to whether to use the contact form or the comments form.
Hopefully I haven’t forgotten anything?
Sue Waters
Support Manager
Edublogs | CampusPress
Thanks Sue. I added links to the About and Ideas pages so they show up below the menu. Yes you can share the page, of course 🙂 I plan to add more ideas. I debated about the Discussion page, thinking as you are, that a discussion with comments from a post would be better. So I took off that page. I took commenting off the contact page as well. Thanks for the guidance. [and I usually use Google forms also, but thought I’d try the polling since it’s part of Edublogs.) Thanks again.