Using & Teaching Educational Technology
Five tips to get teachers blogging
By Terry Freedman
Mon, 18 Sep 2006, 19:53

If you want to get teachers blogging, here are 5 strategies that may help.

1. Don't tell them it's easy. If it is easy, they'll discover it for themselves, but if it isn't they're likely to think it's something they did wrong, or failed to do at all.

Here's a case in point. It doesn't take much effort to set up a blog in blogger. But it doesn't show up until you've actually posted something. This caused some of my teacher trainees to assume that they'd mis-remembered their blog details.

2. Do the research in your own back yard. What difference does it make if 5 trillion new blogs are created every second, or whatever the statistic is? What matters is what "your" teachers are doing. I did a survey of the class of trainee teachers I've just started to teach. Here are the results:

Home access to a computer	97%
Broadband access	72%
Dial-up access	7%
No internet access	21%
Don't know what a blog is	34%
Know what a blog is but don't have one	55%
Know what a blog is and do have one:	10%
Don't know what a Flickr account is	97%
Know what a Flickr account is and do have one	0%
Know what a Flickr account is but don't have one	3%

Look at that! Over a third of the class doesn't know what a blog is. This is definitely not a case of preaching to the converted.

3. Give reasons to blog. Being easy to set up isn't a reason. Because everyone else is doing it (even if it were true) is not a reason. Is it going to help them in some way? If not, or if they can't see it, then why should they blog?

I provided a reason which several students have accepted, judging by their actions. They have to complete a journal known as a Record of Professional Development. I suggested that if they wrote that, or at least some of it, in the form of a blog, then they could easily share experiences with each other, courtesy of the Suprglu account I set up for the purpose. They can see that the resultant RPD could be richer as a result, and so perhaps they will introduce blogging into their own practice.

4. Prove it. In England, schools are obsessed with their place in the league tables. Unless you can show that blogging isn't going to harm their grades, sensible teachers won't take the risk: there's too much at stake.

5. In the Coming of Age: An Introduction to the New Worldwide Web, a group of educators from several countries gave several reasons to engage in blogging, podcasting and all the rest of it. The 2nd edition, which is shaping up nicely, has even more educators giving even more reasons. If you would like to introduce Web 2.0 into a classroom near you, Coming of Age could be a very good place to start. Read it, use it, pass it on.


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© Terry Freedman Mon, 18 Sep 2006