New Year, Old Blog

If you are keeping your same blog,

but starting out with a new class of students...

You know that you have put a lot of effort into building an audience and the extensive hyperlinks to your blog, and the thought of starting from scratch is very off putting.

There is only one reason you cannot keep your blog going with a new class - if your school policy for some reason does not allow this.

Otherwise, at the beginning of the NEW year, give your old blog a make-over if you want to make it different!

• You can change the look with a new template or skin.

• You can change the name of the blog.

• You can even change the URL.

Below are a few tips we have learned from experience!

If you are going to give your blog a makeover,

1. Make your last post before you do that a screen dump of the old blog. ie open your blog, capture it as an image ( on a Mac shift+command+4, on a PC Print Screen) and upload it into a "Farewell old blog" kinda post!

You may be over it now, but in the future you will look back on it with nostalgia - or your students will :)

2. Give it a new theme (from Blogger) or a new skin. This link will take you to a separate page talking about skins. Just beware that while there are plenty of websites out there offering new skins, many of them will delete all your sidebar widgets when you upload them. So all those cluster maps, stats counters etc will be back to zero!

3. Give your blog a new name. It is VERY easy as you can see below. Or you can create a new header in Photoshop or another graphics programme and upload it as your new header.

4. New URL is possible

If your school lets you keep room10coolschool.blogspot.com when you shift to room19coolschool.blogspot.com you may still want to change the URL to something more appropriate.

NB: this is why at Pt England we have suggested that teachers create pesteachersurname.blogspot.com for class blogs now. Soooo much easier to take with you to the next classroom.

No-one I know has been brave enough to change the URL, because we suspect that you will lose all your friends when you do this ie everyone who has hyperlinked to room10coolschool.blogspot.com will not find your new URL - we think!

5. Check that the email addresses have been changed to suit the new class.

Following are three places in the Settings you may need to check....