Do You Want More Readers?

Students, you are writing and getting readers, but how do you increase the number of readers and bring visitors back on a regular basis to read your blog?

Please read Get to Work! You’ll find that one of the ways to increase the number of readers on your blog is to read other blogs and to comment on them. A monologue doesn’t interest people as much as a conversation does.

Go to the Edublogs Community page. Find a student or class blog that seems interesting. Try to comment on the page. Remember to be a good digital citizen. Remember that with each comment, you represent Incarnation Catholic School. Remember that the comment may be moderated and may not show up on the blog until a teacher approves the comment.

Managing Your Student Blog

  1. Log in to your Edublogs student blog.
  2. Go to your dashboard.

Adding the Class Blogs to Your Student Blog

  1. Click on Appearance in the left column. Then select Widgets.
  2. Drag the Class Blogs widget to the sidebar. At the bottom of the Class Blogs in the sidebar, click on Save.
  3. View the blog to see the links to the other students blogs in the ICS Technology class.

Profile and Name

  1. In the left column, click on Users, and then Profile.
  2. Change your nickname to your first name and initial.
  3. Change Display Name Publicly to your nickname.

Voki

  1. Go to the Voki website.
  2. Create a Voki. Enter appropriate text. Select a voice and accent.
  3. When you are satisfied with your Voki, click on publish.
  4. Give it a title and save it. Use your first name+last initial to save it.
  5. In the next window select the small size (100 x 133). Then copy the embed code.
  6. Log in to your student blog. Go to your dashboard.
  7. In the left column, click on Appearance, then click on Widgets.
  8. Drag the Text Widget to the sidebar.
  9. Paste the embed code in the text box. Then Save.
  10. View the site.

Avatar

  1. Bitstrips – good avatar creator but you need to be over 13 years of age or have parent permission
  2. Or try Poptropica to create the avatar.
  3. Build Your Wild Self is another fun avatar site (I used this to create the sample student avatar on Ancient to Modern Music ) The avatar can only be 200 x 200 pixels in size, so it was necessary to crop the image down to just a portion of the face.

Creating Student Blogs

  1. I created usernames, passwords, and email accounts for each grade 7 student. I used the gmail system which allows students to be entered into Edublogs without a real email account. I created one gmail account, then added the student username to the email account. For instance, schoolname@gmail.com becomes schoolname+student1user@gmail.com. Gmail ignores everything after the + so any email sent to schoolname+student1user@gmail.com goes to schoolname@gmail.com.
  2. In the Dashboard, under My Class, I added the Student Users.
  3. The students blogs are set up, so the students will post on their own blogs, not on the class blog. Ms. Whitaker, the English language teacher, and I will approve posts and will approve comments on the student blogs.
  4. Students logged into Edublogs  They completed the information in the image below.
  5. They had decided last week what the topic would be for the blog. That went into the Blog Title line. From there they went back to the first line to enter a name for the Domain. Since this Domain name becomes part of the URL, students understood it had to be simple to remember and to type and it had to be unique from any other edublogs blog. They left the Blog Language set as English and said the Blog Type was Student.
  6. They entered the Captcha, agreed to the Terms of Service and clicked on Start Blogging.
  7. Some students were asked to enter the name of someone in-charge at the school. This should be an administrator or technology person at the school. I didn’t figure out why not all students were asked to enter this information.

  1. Once the blog was created, they went to their dashboard, then to My Class to search for the name of the class blog (this blog) and sent a message requesting to join the class.
  2. As the requests came in, I approved each and made some suggestions for changes for their blog titles – adding capitals, etc. I created the list of students blogs in the right column of this blog.
  3. Student clicked on Appearance in their dashboard and began to experiment with theme templates that complimented their blogs.
  4. They have questions about adding images for backgrounds and headers, etc. I emphasized that all images had to have creative commons licenses and suggested they look in search.creativecommons.org They will add a link to the website to the original source of the image that they decide to use.
  5. They are excited that they will write about topics that interest them, and eager to get the right look for their blog topic. Many said they were going home to work on the design.
  6. We have widget and avatars, etc to develop, and of course have to start writing posts, but that won’t happen until next week.
  7. We also have to agree to digital citizenship guidelines for the blog before we begin writing. We have had a start on that discussion so should get it finished soon.

See Edublogs: Create Class directions.