Edin08 Blogger Summit – Education Blogging at Grassroots

The last session of the day was a breakout session on education blogging at the grassroots. Other people went to one on Blogging in the Trenches, with educator bloggers. That one might be more useful to my readers, who are most likely educators, but I’m trying to find how blogging works with ACTE and the issue of career and technical education. Actually both would probably be useful: how can we blog as the Association and how can we encourage/help you blog as educators? But I can’t be in both places.

Some tips I took from the panel: bringing a personal touch to the blog, including real-world applications and implications, combining promoting your product and a “real” post, using your blog to try out half-formed ideas or talk about peripheral subjects, and defining your purpose as aggregating what other’s have said and letting the conversation go or crafting each post and then being integrated in the conversation.

Joanne Jacobs talked about how bloggers live off the news reported by others, and that her readers show in the comments that they did not follow the links to the source material she used. Ken Bernstein noted that your blog can connect readers and policymakers, for instance, when a congressional aide finds something on your blog and shows it to their boss.

Panelists were Ken Bernstein, educator and blogger (”teacherken”); Kevin Carey, Education Sector; and Joanne Jacobs, blogger, reporter and author of “Our School.”

Awards ceremony next!