8. The Best Edu-bloggers read Edu-Blogs
The majority of teachers who start out blogging initially see it as an experiment; a good place to clarify what they think about the way a lesson has gone (and find that particular lesson again later on for their own personal use); a place to journal reflections as they develop as a trainer; an easy way to share resources created or found with other teachers; a space to connect with colleagues all over the world across time-zones; a way to practice and provide a model so that they can teach their own students to blog.
Some, of course, blog for the
NetVantage, the publicity of their companies.
Some blogs, on the flip-side of this, are small, very private affairs: walled gardens only available for themselves or for a handful of colleagues and/or students.
There comes a point, however, when no matter what we're doing that many of us itch to be found by Google, to reach a broader audience through our words, however, while waiting for this to magically happen by itself, end up losing faith in our blogging abilities and quit way before we've honed our voices and churned out enough copy for Google, or any other search engine for that matter, to find us.
In part 5 of this article, I will go into some of the marketing strategies I adopted early on and tell you what you can do to attract more visitors, for now, though, I will go into the reasons why one of the most important and intelligent things you can possibly do when starting out is to read other educators' blogs.
- If you wanted to become a pop singer you would listen to and play pop music.
- If you wanted to become an author of crime thrillers, you would spend some time around police officers.
- If you wanted to become a screenwriter, you would watch a lot of movies and study old screenplays.
- If you wanted to become a coursebook writer, you would teach with as many different textbooks as you possibly could and practice making as many downloadable lessons plans as your fingers could write and you would distribute these for free, everywhere until someone out there said hey! Want to contribute to this book?
See the pattern?
If you want to become an Edu-Blogger of note, before being of note actually means anything, then read Edu-blogs.
Your fellow blogians are the peers who can provide you with brand new ideas for your own posts; they offer solid examples of writing styles; inform you of all kinds of layout changes you could make on your own; they notify you of carnivals, competitions and awards.
They talk to you about the latest tips in technology which you can try out yourself; they inform you about real issues facing your own educational field or those outside the normal reach of your knowledge; they show you what's trending, what's topical; they force you to think and rethink.
The Educational Blogosphere is your community. Your home. It is your fellow blogian's excitement, it is their commitment to their own work, more than your own, which will give you the motivation to stay committed and working on your own page.
Bloggers who never ever stray out, from the comfort of their own pages; who concentrate on the wonderfulness of their own words, who never venture out from the security, the safety of their own blogs, are, well, pretty much like singles who stay at home watching television: they will never find a like-minded soul with whom to converse.
They will not grow.
The crux, the very thing that makes the blogosphere work at all is the fact that it is conversation of peers.
Knowing what others are writing, have written; knowing what different teachers specialize in enables you to quickly become an expert, an authority within your niche, it helps you not to put a step down wrong by referring to this and that as being an expert in something you're not and most importantly the practice of regularly linking to other blogs / specific posts of your fellow blogians authenticates your knowledge to your readers. Keeping in touch with what the rest of the world (outside the bubble of education) helps pepper your text with real events and trending issues.
And it tells
Google
you are worth
monitoring.
Task:
Set up a reader, search the internet high and low, find other educators in your niche who blog and begin reading
- blogs in the sub-sub niche of your micro-niche
- blogs in the same educational niche, more or less
- general blogs in education
- technology education blogs
- blogs outside of education/ personal hobbies or interests
You probably don't want to follow too much more than 50, given time constraints, however you really do need to be following more than 10 if you want to have a good overview of your field.
The International EduBloggers Directory run by Patricia Donaghy is a good place to start finding educators doing what you are and you can add your own too.
Look at your schedule and then make a serious time commitment to read no less than one other blog
every single day. But if you can manage it, aim to read ten
per week.
9. The Best Edu-bloggers comment on Edu-Blogs
When you're new to blogging, the hardest thing in the world is to comment on someone else's blog.
It's scary stuff, dropping your opinion in and on to an ongoing conversation involving mostly strangers. It can be terribly embarrassing when you reread what you wrote and you can see that it's got hundreds of typos that you're now unable to edit.
If you happen to have been in a bad mood that day, you might have said something you didn't mean. Or, someone might have read something you'd said, taken an unnecessary offense or worst, they laughed at your feeble attempt to explain something you had only been mildly musing about.
So why should you make ever endeavor to make commenting one of your top priorities?
- Commenting provides you with much, much needed practice in sorting and organizing your thoughts quickly.
- Commenting teaches you how to write succinctly.
- Commenting helps you tap into and strengthen your voice.
- Commenting provides you with a chance to go off road to discuss someone else's ideas, concerns, opinions and experiences.
- Commenting introduces you to your fellow blogians; it opens the door for you to be visited, either in return by the Edu-Blogger you were communicating with or by his/her readers through your url linked name; it provides you with a back-link to your own blog - again informing Google of your status as an authority on a particular niche area of education (given that your fellow bloggers keywords generally match your own).
- While commenting, you often find yourself having new ideas for a different post on your own blog.
- Commenting also helps you to develop your "chat-back" voice (something best described as a cross between deep listening, writing editorial opinion pieces and talking with your mates down the pub).
It's also, actually, not easy to respond to comments which is probably why it usually takes bloggers a while to warm up to doing it - or get good at it - and for that matter, I'll let you into a personal secret, while I quickly figured out I had to comment if I ever wanted to become a part of the educational blogosphere and eventually get comments on my own blog, my major weakness is commenting in return to those who comment on my posts.
Sometime it's easy... sometimes I don't want to feel like I'm hoarding the conversation, sometimes I'm simply overwhelmed by what has been shared, sometimes I feel terribly unable to match their response with something intelligent, sometimes I just don't have enough time. Lousy at this, but am consciously learning and studying others who are better:
Jeremy Harmer is the one to watch on how to do this excessively well as is Sue Waters, of EduBlogs.
Do you know anyone else we can all learn from?
WARNING:
There is nothing tackier under the sun than a blogger who visits a blog to leave a back-link.
Do not leave your general url in the content in your comment. However you can (and should) leave urls in comments if you are specifically pointing to a similar specific post you've written that answers, continues a conversation or precedes the conversation you're reading on the page.
Do not ever visit a popular blog only in order to ask him/her to visit your own blog.
Do not ever connect via LinkedIn or Facebook only because you want to ask that person to visit and comment on your blog.
If you have nothing to contribute other than GreatBlog!, then you are a spammer. Take a deep breath, listen to what has been said on the page and respond as if you were talking to the blogger in a normal conversation.
Writing Sorry Shameless Plug in a comment as you shamelessly plug yourself simply just makes you seem even more of a jerk.
In the same way that you would not go to someone's party where they serve caviar and champagne and you would not turn around and invite his guests to ditch this fine fare to come on over to your own house where they can eat chips and watch the footie instead, do not "plug" yourself in someone else's home.
Any questions? How many blogs do you keep track of?
Do you find it easy to comment on posts?
How do you go about finding great blogs to read?
image credit
Mrs Duffee reading her Kindle, after Mary Cassett by Mike Licht, Notions.com
This post is part of a new series on Edu-Blogging. For part 5 of this particular article, please visit Anne Hodgson's
blog (coming soon). For the links to the other posts including glossaries of blogging language, please see list at the bottom of
Thoughts on Being an Edu-blogger.
(c) KarenneJoySylvester, 2010
Karenne is an ELT-Edu-blogger, a ESP:IT teacher, EdTech teacher-trainer and materials writer, originally from Grenada in the Caribbean. She currently lives in Stuttgart, Germany and blogs at Kalinago English (Bab.la/Lexiophile's #2 Global Language Teaching Blogs) and BusinessEnglish~5mins.
Find her on Twitter as @kalinagoenglish.
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Alan Kay is one of the earliest pioneers of object-oriented programming, personal computing, and graphical user interfaces. His contributions have been recognized with the Charles Stark Draper Prize of the National Academy of Engineering “for the vision, conception, and development of the first practical networked personal computers,” the Alan M. Turing Award from the Association of Computing Machinery “for pioneering many of the ideas at the root of contemporary object-oriented programming languages, leading the team that developed Smalltalk, and for fundamental contributions to personal computing,” and the Kyoto Prize from the Inamori Foundation “for creation of the concept of modern personal computing and contribution to its realization.” This work was done in the rich context of ARPA and Xerox PARC with many talented colleagues.
