Blogger

Audience: Teachers & Admin

Behavior on the job: Demonstrate knowledge of Blogger

Condition on the job: Anytime of the day without guidance

Criteria on the job: ISTE 3a- Teachers exhibit knowledge, skills & work processes representative of an innovative professional in a global & digital society.

PGES: Blogger (Domain 2b; communicate with families)

Pre-Google Poll:

https://docs.google.com/a/simpson.kyschools.us/forms/d/1IjRrWs8JoSSv_0Vwu7klygAD9FNh0hEzf4l-0XKuZRY/viewform

Blogger:

What is it?

Why are you blogging?

• Professional Growth

• Classroom Communication

• Student Portfolios

• Professional Portfolio

• ESL- Use the translation feature!

*Ask Yourself/Advice:

1. Will my readers learn something from my post?

2. What kinds of problems or challenges do my readers face?

3. What do they hope to gain from reading my post?

4. Make paragraphs short. Have no more than 2-3 sentences for each paragraph

5. Throw in a one sentence paragraph

6. Bold important ideas and words in your post

7. Break up your paragraphs with lists, bullet lists and subheadings

8. Don’t write for the search engines; write for your audience. This means incorporating your keywords in your post as they would naturally occur and not overthinking it. Write as if you are talking to your friend.

9. Placing your keywords in your headline, subheadings, meta description, and your image alt tags are good practices to live by.

10. A list of 14 Amazingly Free Stock Photo Websites

11. Free imaging editors: Canva, PicMonkey, Pixlr, Sumo Paint, and GIMP

12. Compress your image for faster loading: Kraken (does both JPG and PNG files), Tinyjpg, Tinypng

13. Free fonts: Google Fonts, Dafont, and Font Squirrel

14. Create your own color palette with Adobe Kuler (Adobe Color CC)

*From:

Cain, E. (2015, May). How To Write The Ultimate Blog Post: A Blogger’s Cheat Sheet. Retrieved from http://www.bloggingwizard.com/bloggers-cheat-sheet/

What tools are there out there to help me blog?

• http://www.hubspot.com/blog-topic-generator

• This tools helps you generate ideas when you’re stuck!

• http://feedly.com/

• This is a great site for searching articles that are out on a topic you’re passionate about.

• www.quora.com

• Site that allows you to search or ask questions.

• https://www.portent.com/tools/title-maker

• Title generator.

• http://memegenerator.net/

• Create funny photos for your blog

• EMV tool: Checks the emotional marketing value of a title. The higher the EMV score is, the better it will perform on social media channels.

• Headline Analyzer: This is the best tool in this lot. Regardless of what you know or don’t know about blogging, you will be churning out the best titles for your blog posts.

• TweakBiz title generator: A comprehensive title generator by TweakBiz.

• Potent C idea generator: Call it a content idea generator or a title generator – it functions as both.

• UpWorthy title generator: The only viral topic generator you need.

• Hemingway App: Free web-based tool to improve your writing. I’m sure you will end up bookmarking this one.

• Grammarly: Saviour for a non-native English speaker like me. Helps with proof-reading, suggests words, is a great companion.

• Camtasia: Available for both Windows and Mac OS, and let you record screencasts. Offers a one-month free trial.

• Snag it: Image capturing and editing tool for Mac and Windows OS. One of the best, and highly recommended for bloggers.

• Image Optim: Mac Image compressor tool which optimizes your images for the web.

• MPEG Streamclip: A powerful desktop video converter software for Windows and Mac. You can use it to convert, cut, trim and join videos. I usually use it to convert my video format to reduce the size of the video.

• Audacity: A sound recorder tool for every major desktop OS. Useful for podcasters, as you can record and then edit your recordings.

• Google Plus Hangout: This is one free tool that is underused by bloggers. Use it to co-host a webinar or run a Q&A session with your readers. Streams & records everything on your YouTube channel too.

More here: http://www.shoutmeloud.com/blogging-tools-mega-collection.html

Post-Google Poll:

https://docs.google.com/a/simpson.kyschools.us/forms/d/1EM1HDLXWXUyQUDN9RTvs19sp2-yLA08m0zkGbsgSj5k/viewform

Enhancing Retention:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EQf5l04P2oLr8q41J6cM4slNgzOY47maQIeZaCuFyYw/edit?usp=sharing

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