So You Want to Edu-blog?

By  Katie Hellerman, M.Ed.

Brainstorm
Imagine that we are looking at an index to your blog. Take ten minutes and write down as many titles to posts that would appear.

Determine the purpose of your blog.
Who is your audience? For example, I write for new teachers. Others really have an ed-tech leaning or subject area focus. You don't have to have a purpose, but I find it gives me a little bit of guidance when writing. Look at your list of blog topics. Are there any themes you can draw out?

Make a list of resources
What do you already have that you could modify and use on your blog?

Think about how you best express yourself.
In video, photos, cartoons, short stories, interviews...

Write your first post
Spend no more than a half-hour creating your first blog post. Remember, that it doesn’t have to be an opus or five paragraph essay. I like to keep it short and write the way that I would speak to someone. Again, tone, format and length are all your choice.

Make a commitment.The worst thing you can do is start a blog and then flake out on it. What a waste of every-one's time! Decide how often you will post and force yourself to stick too it.

If you’ve gotten through all the above steps and you are still interested......Sign up for a blog!
If you don’t want to buy your own domain and hosting services, I think blogger would be a great place for you to start a free blog. You'll have to set up a google acct. But you really should have one anyway because of all the resources Google provides (google docs, reader, youtube). If you aren't keen on a google account my next suggestion would be to use Wordpress. It's what I use for my blog (I have my own domain and thus use wordpress.org). I’ve heard the learning curve is significant, but the functionality is better.

You could also skip the whole blog process entirely and publish directly to Google+.

Connect your blog to a social media outlet
Part of the fun of having a blog is knowing that people are reading it. I’ve found that Twitter is a great place to share links to my post and to find other blogs that I like.

About the author: Katie Hellerman is a middle school teacher and success coach for pre-service and new educators. Her work with them focuses on setting short-term goals that lead to the achievement of long-term life goals. Katie is a graduate of Smith College and holds a MEd in Secondary Education from Vanderbilt’s Peabody School of Education.