Three Things

After perusing all the teacher blogs in Middle School, a few things stand out:
1. Teachers have increased the frequency of their posts.
2. The diversity of topics covered has increased

and the focus for this post..
3. many posts lack an engaging look and feel

pic source@Flickr

Here are…

7 Tips to Add Some Punch and Zing to Your Blog Posts

1. Insert a picture per post. Too many posts are large black blob of text. Using a picture sets the tone for your blog post. Be sure to use and show attribution of the Creative Commons photos you use. Two easy way sot do this are by using Compfight and Google Advanced image search.

2. Chunk it. Draw the eye and create a smooth flow for the reader by chunking your text into short(er) paragraphs.

3. Add scanning points. Utilize the bold and text color options to emphasis key words and ideas to your reader.

4. Make lists. Readers like lists. They …

• draw attention to the most important step

• emphasis key ideas

• make it easy to scan

5. Awesome titles and subtitles. Be a student for a second- would you be more likely to click Meet the FlyGuy! or Class Animation Projects.

6. Crisp links. Link the site name itself or a catchy word rather than linking a long ugly URL.

You can check out Mr. Pasamba’s cool class site is a little freiendlier than http://pasambag.ism-online.org

7. Engage your students. Get the students involved by asking a question, creating a contest, requesting a headline to a funny pictur, etc. and encouraging them to respond.  Here is a good example of a teacher site that encourages dialogue.